Dan Snow's History Hit - England and Spain's Battle for Global Supremacy

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

This week in 1588 the Spanish Armada fought running battles in the Channel with the English Navy. It was sent by King Phillip of Spain who ruled half the world to crush Elizabeth Tudor the woman who ruled half an Island but would end in defeat and disaster for the Spanish. The background to this conflict was the growing Anglo-Spanish rivalry that had sprung up ever since the discovery of the New World and the English desire to obtain a slice of the huge wealth, power and influence that could be gained there. The reformation also played its part in pitting protestant England against Spain's Catholics. In the first of two programmes to remember the Armada Dan is joined by Alexander Samson who is a Reader in Early Modern Studies at University College London and has a special interest in Spanish history. Alexander and Dan discuss how this rivalry between England and Spain developed, how the two countries have a centuries-old trading connection, and why the Spanish Armada was far from the only armada!

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History. This week in 1588 it was all kicking off in the Channel. A mighty armada, a fleet of ships sent by King Philip of Spain, the man who ruled half the world, had been sent to crush Elizabeth Tudor, the woman who ruled half an island. The running battles up the Channel, from Plymouth to Portland to the Isle of Wight, had ended in a sort of standoff of Calais whilst the Spanish reviewed their options and checked if they could bring their army from the low countries onto the ships and invade England as King Philip had hoped. The background to this story is of course the growing Anglo-Spanish rivalry that had been humming away ever since the Spanish discovery of the New World and the English desire to get a

piece of the action. For a hundred years, British merchants, slave traders, pirates, adventurers had eyed up the Spanish Empire, eyed up the Atlantic world in a place where they too could seize the advantages to gain huge wealth, power and influence. It was given a religious edge by the Reformation, which pitted England's Protestant buccaneers against Spain's Catholics. So this week, we've got two very special episodes of the podcast. In this first episode, we're going to talk about that Anglo-Spanish rivalry and how it grew and developed with Alexander Sampson. He's a reader in early modern studies at University College London. He's a wonderful communicator. You're going to very much enjoy listening to him.

He's going to tell us about England and Spain. And then later in the week, I, Dan Snow, I'm going to tell you the story of the Spanish Armada. Simple as that. It's one of the first programs I ever made for the BBC. 20 years ago. Little did I know that one day I'd be sitting in a darkened room talking to a device that had not yet been invented to broadcast it in ways I never yet knew possible to an audience of millions

of people. What an exciting journey I've been on. So here's Alexander Sampson. You'll hear my follow-up on the Spanish Armada later in the week. If you wish to go and watch documentaries about Britain's maritime past, there's one place you can do that. Yeah, let me tell you. HistoryHit.tv. You go to HistoryHit.tv. That's the website. HistoryHit.tv. You sign up for a very small subscription. Thousands of people doing it at the moment. All looking quite good. Thank you very much, everyone. You go and subscribe. You get 30 days free. You check if you like it. If you don't, you don't subscribe. Simple as that. Easy, easy easy and then you can watch hundreds of hours of history documentaries or listen to all these podcasts without the ads so head over to historyhit.tv soon listen to this podcast and do

that but in the meantime here is alexander sampson telling us about england and spain enjoy alexander thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Let's go way back before both England and Spain. As part of this Atlantic seafaring world, presumably there were links. There was trade between particularly northern Spain and the west country, the south coast of England. Absolutely. I think there's a long history that goes all the way back into the medieval period of strong trading links between Spain and England. I think the biggest impetus to this, of course, in the 16th century on earth they would want thick woolen cloth in Spain. But I suppose if Spain has mountainous areas, and of course, when in the early modern period, the Habsburg dynasty ruled over both the Low Countries and Spain, in order to protect their trade, they needed England to be an ally as opposed to an enemy. and that was one of the predominant things that pushed the rapprochement we see at the beginning of the 16th century with the first dynastic marriages between England and Spain. But the

commercial privileges go all the way back to the 1300s. It's one of the first commercial treaties assigned between England and Spain, giving English merchants privileges and the freedom to trade into Spain. I just said the other thing is, of course, that there was a Capilla de los Ingleses, an English chapel in Sanlúcar de Barrameda in southern Spain. And English merchants throughout the 16th century had a really strong foothold under the protection of, and then left and abandoned them and refused to pass on inheritances to them and that sort of thing. The other great example is when Robert Reniger seizes one of the Spanish treasure ships in 1545. Philip II immediately orders an embargo of English goods, writes to Seville to the House of Trade there and says, embargo all their goods. And

they write back and say, well, we can't really do that because the English are such an important market for us. They buy all our wine and olive oil and horses and so on. But if we do that, we're just going to be damaging your own royal revenues. So I think that economic interdependence was very clear from very early on. Well, the other one that's very early on is one that I've never been able to get my head around. John of Gaunt going off to try and become king of Castile. I mean, that comes out of left field, right? He marries Constance, I think it was, a princess, and has a sort of slightly hopeless attempt to, in the 14th century, to become king of Castile. And is that where we get our strange Anglo-Portuguese?

I know we're not here to talk about Anglo-Portugal, but is that where our strange Anglo-Portuguese, that kind of pub fact that England and Portugal have been in alliance for longer than any other two countries on earth or whatever? Yes, yes. The story of John of Gaunt, as you say, that is a kind of successor of a series of dynastic marriages that you kind of see, Blanche of Castile, the Charing Cross. So there's a series of dynastic marriages that you kind of see, Blanche of Castile, the Charing Cross. So there's a series of crosses that we have, which are kind of a big part of our public heritage, were to commemorate effectively Spanish queens. So there was a long series of Spanish queens. And you're right, yes, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster does try to become

King of Spain at one time. The other person who tries to become actually the metropolitan of the Spanish church is Cardinal Wolsey. So there's a point early on when Charles V travels to Spain with Adrian of Utrecht, and Adrian of Utrecht dies, and then Cardinal Wolsey is kind of angling for that role. And it's interesting, things like the Duke of Albuquerque served alongside Henry VIII's troops at the Siege of Boulogne as well. There is a very long established, both dynastic, and of course, when Catherine of Aragon and Arthur marry, and when Philip and Mary marry, people are quick to point out that they're already related. And in fact, particularly when Philip II comes to England in 1554 to marry Mary I, they create genealogical

trees showing the descent from Edward I and Edward III between the two royal houses, and they say he's coming back home. It's a kind of return home for him. Right, well, let's get things in order slightly. So we got this extraordinary, it's not really a coincidence because they are interrelated, but the fact that Spain, as we understand today, sort of comes into being with the finishing off the conquest, the destruction of Moorish, Islamic North African Spain,

how we're going to say, in the very late 15th century, at exactly the same time that Christopher Columbus heads over and opens up European eyes, this gigantic Western hemisphere with all the opportunities and trade and conquest

and spoils that will result. That is one of the great hinge points of world history. And it kind of transforms the relationship between, well, Spain comes into existence, I guess, and therefore one of its most important relationships is then going to be with this nation to its north

that is also on the Atlantic seaboard, which is England. Yes, 1492 is this kind of annus mirabilis, isn't it, of many different things. So you have the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. You have the completion of the conquest of Granada. I think we tend to pick on these moments, these symbolic dates that seem to us to be watersheds in some ways. Even in 1492, the notion of Spain is complicated because Ferdinand and Isabella unite the kingdoms of Castile and Aragon through their marriage. But actually, when Isabel of Castile

dies, Ferdinand is asked to retire to his Aragonese kingdoms. And it does not continue, despite having been king of Spain, in inverted commas, or Castile and Aragon, he's not allowed to stay in Castile. He's told to leave for his daughter, Juana la Loca, one of the crazy, when she kind of comes back from the low countries with her husband, Philip the Handsome. And so they rule over Castile for a time. And in the meantime, Ferdinand marries someone called Germain de Foix. Now, if they'd had a child, that child would have inherited the kingdom of Aragon, and Spain never would have happened, so to speak.

When Charles V inherits both kingdoms, he becomes king of the Spains. And there's this wonderful equivocation between whether Spain is a single entity. And it's interesting, Spain is understood from the outside much better than it's understood from the inside, in a sense. There's an external perception of internal unity, which doesn't really exist. So there's a wonderful equivocation in all of the marriage treatises. It talks about Castellanos y Españoles, or Castilians and Spaniards. And so clearly, Castilian and Spaniard are not synonymous terms. The New World was an exclusively Castilian enterprise. And in theory, only Castilians were allowed to travel, profit,

and trade in the New World. And indeed, laws dating from the 17th century have to specify in the New World. And indeed, laws dating from the 17th century have to specify the fact that the Aragonese and of course, bits of Italy were part of the Hispanic monarchy. So actually, what being Spanish meant in the 16th century is quite a complicated thing. It seems obvious to us, but I think it was less obvious to people living at the time. Oh, God, it's why words like Iberia, I guess, are useful. Yes, exactly. Yeah. And as you say, initially, the same monarchs controlled what we now call Belgium and Holland, Holland in particular.

Yeah. So coastal trade, very important. So England was sitting astride that coastal trade. So as you say, the early Tudors, they married Arthur and then Henry VIII married Catherine of Aragon. Spain was seen as the natural ally. That's right. Yes.

And Juana, or Joanna, Catherine's older sister, marries Philip the Handsome of Burgundy. And so therefore unites Spain, allies Spain with the low countries, what we now think of as Belgium and Holland. And yeah, absolutely crucial. And then Mary marries Philip of Spain, Charles V's son. Yes. Then it all gets a bit complicated by the old Reformation, doesn't it? I mean, that's the problem. We get a bit of Spanner in the works. It does. Well,

again, that's a really interesting question. So, I mean, I could show you, you know, this is my book. So it's all about Philip and Mary. And of course, the thing that the book talks about a lot is that England is still a Catholic country, despite the religious changes that Henry VIII had brought in in Edward VI, many people, perhaps the majority of the population, were perfectly happy to return to traditional religion. And I think the other thing is that religion, it's a very complex topic because before you begin to argue about religion, you don't necessarily have to believe anything very concrete.

It's something that's much more vague. But when you're actually talking to somebody who has a very specific theological view of why you're completely wrong and they're completely right, then suddenly boundaries and ritual and the things that you do and what you think of your identity as being in religious terms becomes much, much sharper. So for the Spanish, they had always lived in a state where there were Jews and Muslims living alongside them. So their sense of themselves as Christians was perhaps much clearer than English people's sense of what it meant to be Christian living in the early 16th century before the Reformation. So anyway, when Philip and Mary marry, I don't think people look on

Philip II at that point in England as this sort of Catholic extremist, this kind of bigot. He's very much a Renaissance prince at this time. He spent the previous few years hobnobbing with his father's Protestant family and subjects in the German lands. He's done a kind of grand tour of the empire, visiting both Protestant and Catholic places. So the kind of vision we have of Philip II, which is very, very palpable in popular culture, films like Elizabeth, the Golden Age, and so on, as a counter-Reformation extremist, is a view that comes with the benefit of hindsight, reading back from who he was in the 1590s, back into who he was in the 1550s. He was welcomed in England as king in many ways. I would argue, and I argue in the book, that he was quite popular. I wrote an article about Anglo-Spanish relations in the 16th century, which is called The Fine Romance. And I think it's rather kind of curious the way that England and Spain fall in and out of love throughout the century,

with these two big, really important dynastic marriages, but then the Anglo-Spanish War in the second half of the 16th century, obviously, and a breakdown. And what's interesting about that is the Anglo-Spanish trade survives political turmoil pretty well. The merchants go on trading and they find ways around those kinds of barriers to them. But Philip II and his Spanish courtiers came in great numbers. And who are his Spanish courtiers? Well, they're people from all over the place. They're Portuguese, they're Italian, as well as being Castilian. And indeed, the English are incorporated into his household at that point. It's always the naughty answer to this, who founded the Royal Navy. There's that great meeting when Philip of Spain says,

you know what, you need to build more ships because clearly the wealth and protection of england is at sea and many of those ships end up fighting the spanish armada some years later exactly yes yes that's absolutely right yeah spain england were they destined to fall out i mean did the reformation simply add a layer and indeed more than Reformation, as you point out, the kind of embedding of the Protestant idea, the popular Protestantism as it slowly took hold in England? Yeah. That just give it an edge to what would have inevitably been an imperial competition. I mean,

those West countrymen like Drake and Hawkers, irrespective of religion, they were eventually going to go, hold on, we're going to break this monopoly and we're going to trade with the new world, right? And then we're going to hopefully seize bits of it? Or do you think that strategic competition, that hard, violent competition does emanate from the religious, ideological falling out that occurred in the mid-16th? Yeah, that's a great question. I think in some ways, perhaps, yes, inevitably, the economic competition would inexorably have driven them towards greater and greater political rivalry in some senses. But then they could have cooperated

equally. The Americas are a vast space. The Spanish only ever really controlled a very small part of it. And I think there's a really interesting contrast. And so between 1580 and 1640, the Crown of Portugal and Spain are united, of course, united under Philip II in 1580. And the Portuguese and Spanish Empire often contrasted very strongly with essentially the difference being that the Portuguese is a maritime trading empire, perhaps more similar to the kind of empire that we see developing in Britain later on, whereas the Spanish Empire is very much a territorial empire.

So I think that's the really interesting question. Different models of empire as well perhaps would have led to different kinds of competition or cooperation and collaboration potentially against other forces. But now I think coming back to the question about the reformation, I think you're absolutely right. What happens across the 16th century is that religion becomes increasingly political and politicised as well. And that's something that's not necessarily true earlier on. There's a European elite in the first half of the 16th century who were trying to have serious conversations about theology, but then that begins to resolve itself and cut across political competition. And whether

religion becomes a tool of political integration or whether political integration essentially begins to want to rein in the inherent internationalism of religion and particularly Catholicism. And that's always a tension. I mean, let's not forget Philip II was excommunicated by the Pope while he was King of England because Cardinal Paul IV, the Carafa Pope, had been excluded from his traditional family see in Naples, Charles V had refused to grant it to him. So he was virulently Hispanophobic and absolutely hated the Spanish. So I think you're right. I think there's a really interesting debate happening

in the 16th century about what is the role of religion. And coming back to the merchant communities, many of the English merchants would simply have conformed while they're in Spain, they would have attended mass and appeared to all intents and purposes to be Catholic, whereas they would have obviously conformed to Anglican ritual when they were in England. And I think that amphibiousness is again really interesting. And the extent of Nicodemism, in other words, the extent to which religion is a matter of principle or a matter of culture or a matter of practice or something that you actively choose or just something that you possess genealogically, I think all of those questions are really complex. And it takes religious conflict burgeoning across the century to really sharpen those sectarian divisions between

Catholic and Protestant. But yes, I think from 1588 onwards, religion begins to play a bigger and bigger role. And talking about 1588, one thing we haven't mentioned is the 1589. I mean, that's such a symbolically important date. But yet England sent an armada back the following year, the 1589 armada, and that there are several further armadas in the 1590s. And England lose far more ships than Spain do as a result of fighting in 1589 than Spain loses in 1588. So I think, again, it comes back to that idea of what are these kind of watershed moments? What are these turning points? And is the problem for Philip II that Elizabeth is a Protestant, or is the problem that she is interfering too much in the internal politics of the Low Countries,

and therefore is actually a political threat? He's not actually that worried about her religion. If you listen to Dan Snow's History Hit. I'm talking to Alexander Sampson about England and Spain in this Spanish Armada anniversary week. More after this. Land a Viking longship on island shores. Scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt

and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive, but to conquer. Whether you're preparing for Assassin's Creed Shadows or fascinated by history and great stories, listen to Echoes of History, a Ubisoft podcast brought to you by History Hits. There are new episodes every week.

whether or not the spanish armada marks a new beginning in english maritime history is a question that makes my head fall off every time i ask myself so let's not do it here but let's point out that the spanish armada was defeated subsequent armadas It's really hard to invade England from Spain for lots of reasons. And they fail. It's also really hard for the English to... It's hard to carry out blue water amphibious operations, basically, in this period. Okay? So let's just leave it at that. Spanish troops in Ireland.

Elizabeth ends up in a brutal attritional struggle in Ireland. And that kind of leads on then to this weird moment, this Stuart moment, of rapprochement and dynastic marriages. James I, Charles. Yes. And what role does Spain play within early Stuart England? And is cozying up to the Spanish, artistically, obviously, we've got all Charles' art and everything. But is this seen now as kind of un-British, un-English rather, and one of the many causes of the Civil War?

It's insufficiently aggressive towards Spain and Spanish interests around the world? I mean, again, I think that's a really complex question. Yes, I mean, 1605, the Treaty of London, I think is welcomed by many, many people. And there are people writing at the end of Elizabeth's reign to say, Spain are our traditional friends, rather than our enemies. And we should simply go back to that alliance. I'm particularly interested in the kind of huge influence of Spanish culture in Jacobean England. So the dramatist who follows Shakespeare as the principal dramatist of The King's Men, John Fletcher, a quarter of all the plays that he wrote were derived from Cervantes, Miguel de

Cervantes' prose fictional works, including Don Quixote. Don Quixote was one of the first texts to be translated. And so you have this curious paradox that there are huge numbers of translations from Spanish. Spain and Spanish culture are hugely influential, but also slightly toxic. So there's a wonderful phrase, disavowed emulation. So you have lots of English writers translating and being interested in Spanish cultural goods, navigational treatises, works of medicine, works on botany, works on the new world. They're fascinated by this global superpower who is their Atlantic neighbor, and they want to imitate them, but they don't want to be seen to be imitating them in some ways. So I think you're right. So I think the relationship in the Jacobean

period becomes slightly more complex. And I think what I would say in terms of the competition by the end of the Jacobean period is definitely sharpening. And again, it's a sort of tripartite conflict between the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Spanish with England. And I think that that competition is going global. It's about battles such as the Amboina massacre, for example. It's about competition between the Dutch and the Portuguese. And where do the English and Spanish fit into those kinds of stories? Spanish fit into those kinds of stories. And I guess, of course, the establishment of English colonies in North America during the Jacobean period is an important innovation. I mean,

from the 1560s, 70s onwards, England have been wanting to emulate Spain in terms of its colonial enterprises overseas. In 1555, Richard Eden described the Spanish as demigods for their heroic achievements in the New World. That's very, very different from what you get under Oliver Cromwell in the context of the English Civil War and the English Commonwealth period, where Bartolome de las Casas, who was a Dominican friar who was out in the New World, and he wrote a famous denunciation called A Short History of the Destruction of the Indies, much translated, translated in 1580, translated by Oliver Cromwell's nephew, John Phillips. He titles it The Tears of the Indians. So I think by that point

in the later 17th century, there's a strong sense in which the Spanish and English empires are beginning to be kind of held in parallel with each other, and the project to establish a colony in Jamaica, for example, very explicitly beginning to compete with Spain in a naval context in the New World. And I think the origins of that go back to the Jacobean period, but it's only just beginning. And there's a huge Hispanophile as well as a pro-Spanish lobby. And what's interesting coming back to Fletcher is that he's politically anti-Spanish, but he loves Spanish culture. So lots of people are reading Spanish, learning the Spanish language in Jacobean London, partly because of that kind of get to know your enemy. I'm sure that even though America is not everybody's flavour of the month around the world, that doesn't stop people watching Friends or watching Hollywood films. And then the long 18th century wins that imperial struggle. Spain suffers terribly

in the war-spanning recession, and her navy is trounced in the Seven Years' War, the War of American Independence, the French Wars of the late 18th and 19th. But is that external pressure on the empire, or is that just Spain's empire internally incoherent? People date the zenith of the Spanish empire to different moments. Many people say it happens in 1580. And then it's just a very, very slow decline, a desperate attempt to hold together the massive, massive territorial empire, global empire that they rule over. I think those internal contradictions and internal tensions are really palpable. And by the 1630s, 1640s, the new world itself has become so powerful and so independent in a way of the motherland that the struggle is for Spain to hold on to

its own empire and its own empire not to become independent sooner. By 1650, Mexico City was one of the biggest cities in the world. There were hundreds of Chinese barbers living and working in Mexico City because it was this extraordinary multicultural global city. Essentially, they overtake, in some ways, the metropolis back home. And I think that's the real struggle for Spain. The second thing that, of course, happens is Charles II succeeds from the 4th after a long regency period. And then you have the end of the Habsburg dynasty and the accession of the Bourbons. So the Spanish royal

family becomes seen very much as a kind of cadet branch of the French royal family. And that Bourbon connection between France and Spain becomes very, very significant, I think, in the early 18th century and onwards. And the kind of military competition is really interesting. You have spies travelling to Britain to spy on our kind of shipbuilders. And in fact, lots of English shipbuilders were tempted away from Britain to go and work in Spain, building ships for them. So there was definitely an arms race in terms of shipbuilding that goes on around the War of Jenkins here and those kinds of conflicts. But yes, I think as you say, there's just a growing sense of people rubbing up against each other in terms of the global maritime trading system.

And I think Britain and Spain increasingly are competing with each other in the 18th century. But Spain's own kind of situation in that period is a vastly weakened central state. And despite the Bourbon reforms, which attempt to rationalise their relationship with Latin America and the Latin American territories, that is the real thing that I think hampers in some ways the long-term efficacy of Spain as a global power. I'm really struck by the fact the Spanish empire of the Americas falls away with a bit of freelancing British and Irish help, famous naval officers going out and fighting for Chilean navy and all that kind of stuff. London was quite happy about that, wasn't it? There's a great expression like, they will cease to be Spanish and they will become

British. And although there was one British expedition to Buenos Aires in the early 19th century, which was actually a bit of a disaster. It's a sense they're not going to become British as in like pink on the map, but they're moving to a kind of British orbit, that informal empire that we recognised in the 19th century, which is kind of just as important as formal empire, really. And so what does Britain mean in that period on both sides of the Atlantic

in the Spanish-speaking world? Yeah, I think that's a really interesting question. And the thing I always look at is the East India Company and the fact that the East India Company in that period has a quarter of a million men-at-arms. It's the biggest army in the world. It's an army that's bigger than all of the armies of all the major nation states in that period put together. And so I think it's in some ways that sort of idea of a kind of franchise system that in a way, it's mercantilism of a kind where the British state is a guarantor for the overseas commerce. And these trading companies are effectively like mini-states in and of themselves. They have their own armies, their own bases. And I think that's definitely what's happening because, of course, the American

War of Independence happens around this time as well. So Britain's own empire, as such, is falling apart at a kind of similar moment. And I think it all goes back to the French Revolution, the spread of these revolutionary ideas. What I find fascinating is that we tend to think of Latin America, particularly through the lens of the military dictatorships of the 1970s. But in many ways, in the 19th century, it was one of the most advanced and cultured and cultivated places in the world. 1907, I think that Argentina was the seventh largest economy in the world, for example. And I think that sort of power, you have these multicultural, multi-ethnic, multilingual states, which exist very successfully in that world. And that is

something that perhaps we don't always realise in the English-speaking world, that that space, those semi-independent states, were highly successful for a very, very long time. And actually, it's the attempt to exert very tight military control over places that often lead states to collapse. But that franchise, that more informal colonial relationship or relationships that are a mixture of economic and political, and you're always dealing with different agents. So different groups have different interests. The indigenous groups, you have the racially mixed societies, which are not as afflicted by the kind of scientific racism of the 19th century as we are, which are very much born of the Western science that we see in places like Britain and France. But they're not as afflicted by those problems until later on. later on. And then Spain itself, we're moving into the modern period now, but what does Englishness, what does Britishness mean in Spain in the 19th or 20th centuries?

Is their northern neighbour important to them? Land a Viking longship on island shores, scramble over the dunes of ancient Egypt and avoid the Poisoner's Cup in Renaissance Florence. Each week on Echoes of History, we uncover the epic stories that inspire Assassin's Creed. We're stepping into feudal Japan in our special series Chasing Shadows, where samurai warlords and shinobi spies teach us the tactics and skills needed not only to survive but to conquer whether you're preparing for assassin's creed shadows or fascinated by history and great stories listen to echoes of history a ubisoft podcast brought to you by history hits there are new episodes every week very much so i mean i think history of spain in the 20th century is fascinating i mean obviously it's dominated by the franco dictatorship that comes to an end in 1976 so one of the things that

really strikes me is that spain was pegged in the 18th century as different i come as voltaire who said that africa begins at the Pyrenees. This idea of Spain as somehow being exotic, the inheritance of the Islamic world and the three faiths, the three religions of the book all coexisting in Spain for a thousand years. Those kinds of ideas, I think, set Spain apart as a European nation. So I think when the Franco dictatorship ended in 1976, the Spanish love to see themselves as Europeans. They are one of the most pro-European nations in Europe. And they're hugely admiring, I think, of what they would describe as the Anglo-Saxon way of life. They look at Northern Europe as something that's significantly different to their sort of cultural inheritance.

But they're very admiring of it. to their sort of cultural inheritance, but they're very admiring of it. They're very admiring of the success of the American and British laissez-faire capitalist world. And they look at the wealth of America and Britain in relation to other European countries, and particularly that divergence between Northern and Southern Europe, and would very much like to place themselves, I think, in. So I think Spain is a place that's hugely admiring of Britain. On the other side, I think that notion of a fine romance is really useful here, that idea of opposites attracting. The Spanish and British have had a very complementary and good relationship for a very long time. We're both Atlantic powers, the importance of the maritime in our history. They've both got a very strong tradition of entrepreneurship as well, of people going out on their own, people wanting to escape from the

strictures of unfreedom in lots of ways. So I think that's something that very much is admired in Spain. I think that's very much the way that they see Britain. They still see Britain as very much an ideal place. And I think obviously British people love Spain because of the way of life, because of the perception of not having that Protestant work ethic. Although, actually, the fact of the matter is that Spanish work longer hours than almost any other people in Europe. So this idea of Southern Europeans as somehow less industrious is not really true. But you just have to be industrious in a very different way when it's 35 degrees heat every day. You have to work smart rather than hard. Well, so it's actually a love affair. So the Stuarts were right.

It is. So actually, the Protestant, swashbuckling Protestant buccaneers, they're a dead end. They're a historical dead end, as if we didn't know that already. Absolutely. Well, there's a great poem by Lopith of Ager, which is all about Francis Drake, and he's called the dragon, but they love him. I mean, the poem is incredibly admiring of this liberal gentleman who releases his captives, and is incredibly generous, and sort of displays all these noble qualities, which the Spanish hugely admire. And on the other side, may see the Spanish as very mannered and sort of formal, but they're also profoundly very admiring

of their ideas of gentility and civility as well. I mean, that's the other side of that. It's what I was saying earlier on about this disavowed emulation, that they want to poo-poo it, but precisely because they think, actually, that's rather good, and I wish we could be a bit more like that. Well, the other one, of of course is I grew up reading the kind of fairly nationalist literature fiction around Spanish hopelessness in the Napoleonic War and stuff. Yes. And actually I wrote a book years ago about the Seven Years' War and if you go back the Brits were profoundly struck by Spanish courage. In fact they thought they were rather too brave and they were too keen to fight it out with steel on the cortex whereas the Brits were like what are talking about? We're just going to have better ships and better cannon and blast them to pieces in a scientific

way. And actually, you get a very different sense of enormous respect for Spanish seafarers and soldiers in that period. One of the best loved Spanish literary characters, Don Quixote, 18th century English novelist, had a total love affair with Cervantes. And there's a great quote a British commentator at the end of the 17th century said of Cervantes that he had effectively destroyed the Spanish empire by turning it into a joke, by turning it into this comic fantasy. He'd effectively undermined Spanish chivalry and Spanish martial valor and their kind of obsession with honor and so on and so forth. And in a way, Don Quixote has become this emblematic figure of what Spain is, this

slightly impoverished, broken down, hopeless dreamer who doesn't live in the real world. But let's not forget he is a literary character. And the point of him as a literary character is he is a vehicle of satire of that society and its status obsession, and very much a reflection of its own author, Miguel de Cervantes, who had been a soldier himself, who had been seriously injured fighting against the Ottomans in 1571 at the Battle of Lepanto. And what I love about the career of Cervantes is he was completely unknown. Nobody had a clue who Cervantes was, apart from a couple of minor poems. And then about the age of 50, he writes this book. There's hope for us all, Dan.

There's hope for us all. It's never too late. But he tried to get a post as an accountant in the New World. So in this thrusting new entrepreneurial world of the Americas in that period, very much beyond the kith and kin of centralized, deadening monarchical control, Cervantes wanted to go out and be the contador for Cartagena de India as one of the big ports. But what a disaster for the world that would have been if Cervantes had got the job as an accountant in the Indies, as opposed to being kind of impoverished and embittered and remaining in Spain. Well, there's lots of lessons there for us all, I think.

That was brilliant. Thank you so much, Alexander. Pleasure. Lovely to talk to you. I feel the hand of history upon our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country, all were gone and finished. Thank you for making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project. If you did feel like doing me a favour, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and

give it a review, give it a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.