Dan Snow's History Hit - The Defeat of the Spanish Armada

Episode Date: July 31, 2022

In July 1588 the Spanish Armada sailed from Corunna to conquer England. Three weeks later an English fireship attack in the Channel—and then a fierce naval battle—foiled the planned invasion. Many myths still surround these events. The genius of Sir Francis Drake is exalted, while Spain’s efforts are belittled. But what really happened during that fateful encounter?For this episode of the podcast, Dan welcomes back distinguished professor and historian, Geoffrey Parker. They deconstruct the many legends to reveal why, ultimately, the bold Spanish mission failed.‘Armada. The Spanish Enterprise and England's Deliverance in 1588’ will be published in October 2022.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today!To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi buddy, welcome to Dan Snow's History. When I was a young kid, 10 years old, one of the first history books, one of the first adult history books I ever came across was the brilliant description of the Spanish Armada in 1588 by Geoffrey Parker and Colin Martin. It was written for the 400th anniversary of that remarkable naval campaign. In July of 1588, Philip of Spain, a man who they said at the time ruled half the world, sent a mighty armada, an invincible armada it was thought, north to take out Elizabeth Tudor, a woman who ruled half an island. Protestant England would be brought back into the Catholic fold. This was a hugely ambitious plan. It involves sailing this gigantic armada up through the Bay of Biscay into the Channel,

linking up with an army of Spanish veterans who are campaigning in the Low Countries, what is today Belgium, and then dashing across the Narrows like so many invaders have dreamt before or since. So close, just whip across the narrows and march on London, brushing aside the small and inexperienced army that Elizabeth Tudor counted on to save her throne and her life. But it didn't go well. It didn't go well for the Spanish. And what resulted? The victory of the English has become a foundation myth for England and Britain's maritime destiny, for Britain's empire and its rise to global hegemony. I've loved the story ever since my dad first read me that book by

Martin and Parker all those years ago. So imagine the situation the other day. I'm sitting at home. A big envelope arrives at my house, a padded envelope. Inside it, there's a book manuscript. I have no idea what's coming. This is cold. Okay. I open it up. I read the front cover. It says Armada, the Spanish enterprise and England's deliverance in 1588 by, this can't be true, by Geoffrey Parker and Colin Martin. What madness is this? Yes, Parker and Colin Martin. What madness is this? Yes, the two legends have spent the last 30 years updating that book, doing more research, spending hours, weeks in archives in Holland, Spain, England and elsewhere, and have improved on perfection, folks. They have rewritten one of the great classics of modern historical writing. It's even better. And I basically went into some sort of fugue state,

an expression I learned from Breaking Bad. I went into some fugue state for hours and hours while I read this book. I was no use to anyone as a business associate, as a podcaster, TV presenter, husband, father, or friend, because I was so engrossed in this book. And then Geoffrey Parker very kindly agreed to come on this podcast. So, terrifically, thisossed in this book. And then Geoffrey Parker very kindly agreed to come on this podcast. So, terrifically, this is a podcast with the legend that is Geoffrey Parker. You've heard him before on the podcast talking about the crisis of the 17th century and global cooling. He is one of the world's greatest historians. He's a professor

of European history at Ohio State University. He's taught everyone in the world. He's one of the best of the best, and it's great to have him back in this pod. We go deep on this pod, folks. I make no apology. If you don't like 16th century naval history, you may not want to listen to this podcast too closely, but I know that you'll love it, so I have no worries at all. Ladies and gents, it's the Armada with Geoffrey Parker. Enjoy. Geoffrey Parker, welcome back on the podcast. I could not be happier to have you here. Me too. Thank you so much. My excitement at seeing the fact that you have, what are we saying, revised, rewritten, upsold? What's the word? It's a huge piece of work on one of the great history books

written of my lifetime, and you've done it. But what are we calling it? It's got a slightly different title because it's a very different book. It's now just Armada. Because in English history, there's really only one, the one that sails in 1588. But it's rewritten. It's all rewritten. There are five additional chapters. There is new material in every one of them.

The titles of the existing chapters are the same, but we've added some. Okay. The point is you have re-released, re-written, enlarged upon one of the great and seminal history books of my lifetime. I'm very grateful that you've done that. Thank you very much indeed. And the reason you've done that is because you've discovered so much more. We published that book in 1988. Not an idle choice of year. It took a lot of planning. We signed a contract for it in 1983. It took us about five years to research it, but we went ahead. Since then, there's been an enormous amount of literature published, mostly in Spanish, but a lot of it in English, and some in Dutch. And we have gone through all of it. There have been sensational

new discoveries of Armada wrecks, and in particular, three ships that went down off Streda Strand off Sligo in Ireland. And they have not been fully excavated. But climate change has actually done our job for us. The new storm systems, the new weather systems have uncovered large parts and several artifacts of those three ships. And they have been taken in, they have been examined, and they're now in conservation. It's going to be very hard not to just do the whole story of the Armada in this episode, but let's whiz through. in this episode, but let's whiz through. And I'd like, if it's possible, you to bring the results of this great research and tell me where you think the kind of traditional tellings of the Armada story have changed importantly. First of all, the composition of the fleet itself, the Spanish Armada, this gigantic naval expedition to England, made up of sailors,

soldiers, it's carrying a great siege train on board for an eventual invasion of England. But the job of that fleet is not itself initially to invade England. It's to go to the low countries where there's a veteran Spanish army fighting against Dutch rebels and transport them across. What have we learned about Philip's plan in the last 30 years? The disappointing news, Dan, is that the Spaniards still lose. We haven't been able to overturn that verdict. We haven't learned a lot more about the ships that sailed. We have their biographies. There's a wonderful publication called La Batalla del Mar Oceano, and it's 12 parts published by the Spanish Ministry of Defense.

They're available online. Anyone can download them and consult them. And volume five includes a biography of every ship that sailed in the Armada. That's 130 plus some of these tiny little oed vessels, rather like gondolas. They're called faluas, and they are for communications. There's some more small ships. So we think Medina Sidonia leaves Lisbon on the 28th of May, 1588, with probably 150 ships rather than 130. But that's not a big difference. We haven't discovered new big warships which sail. So that's the same. The plan is the same, this foolish, foolish plan that you cannot invade until you've united this large fleet in Lisbon with a large army in the Netherlands, in the province of Flanders. Then you get them together and you cross the channel from Dunkirk to Margate and you disembark and off you go.

That remains the same. A particularly bonkers plan given that you have no way of uniting the army and the navy because the Dutch shallow draft vessels dominate that particular stretch of coastline. Well, how I wish Philip II was here to comment on that. You see, he would have said, well, yes, Mr. Snow, you're correct, but you're forgetting that God is on our side, and God will provide good weather. And God does pretty well as far as the Armada is concerned. I mean, it arrives from Karana, it arrives in the Channel in just over a week.

It is within sight of the Lizard on the 30th of July, and on the 6th of August is anchors off Calais, having lost three warships, the Galles, which were meant to help with getting the army out and onto the fleet. But it still has four Galles, which are very, very heavily armed vessels with a very shallow draft. And the idea was to send the galleasses in to get the army out of Dunkirk. They needed 48 hours. The problem is they don't get 48 hours. Well, we'll come to that. We'll come to why not in a second. The most famous, probably one of the most famous incidents of that campaign. But let's talk about the Armada.

As you say, despite the fact that so many think the Armada was defeated by the weather, the weather was actually particularly benign. They arrive in good order off the coast of Cornwall, spotted. The English fleet have a flood tide. They can't get out of Plymouth. They risk getting trapped in Plymouth. Why do the Spanish, and I've asked myself so many times, Geoffrey, why do the Spanish not attack the Viper's Nest,

the fleet of the English in Plymouth, when they had them at their mercy? Okay, there we do have new material since 1988. One day in 1994, a friend of mine, Fernando Boutha, a Spanish historian, said, hey, Jeffrey, we found some documents in the Archivo Historico Nacional in a series called Military Orders. And the archivists and I can't make out why they're there. Oh, I said, interesting, Fernando. I have nothing better to do. Let me go in with you and have a look. And they're called Papeles Curiosos, curious papers, odd papers,

diverse papers. And it is four boxes of documents about Philip II's plans to invade England. And they include the journal kept by the vice admiral, the vice commander of the fleet, a man called Juan Martinez de Riquelde. And along with the journal, he sends eight little notes, billetes as they're called. We call them inter-office memos. He writes a letter to the flagship, excellentissimo senor, to the Duke, and signs it, and the Duke writes on the left-hand margin with his reply. So we have these exchanges. I think these are the earliest exchanges in a naval campaign under fire. Why does Ricalde keep them? Why does he also keep two letters from Laiva, Don Alonso de Laiva, who is, although he doesn't know it, Ricalde has a secret

document appointing Laiva to command the fleet if Medina Sidonia dies, falls overboard, or goes insane. And we have those letters, we have the billetes, and we have the journal, and they're all in this series, Papeles Curiosus. Why? And I think the answer is that Ricalde sent them to the king expressly to incriminate Medina Sidonia because it is full of questions like, why did we not go for Plymouth? We were all in favor of it. We discussed it at the Council of War. We said we'd do it and we sailed on. And I don't understand why. And so now we know that it was discussed and we know why the duke refused to do it. He argues quite truthfully, my orders from the King are explicit. I must not stop. I may not stop for any reason until I reach the

Netherlands. My destination is Dunkirk, not Plymouth. And so he sails on by. But there is an animated discussion on the night of the 30th of July. We should briefly talk about the character of Medina Stonia, the Duke who's been given command of this expedition. He's no particular naval experience. Why was he given the job? Is it to a certain extent he was grand enough that he could keep the fractious aristocratic commanders of the Armada in line? Well, let me put it this way, Dan. The commander of the Armada is meant to be the Marquess of Santa Cruz, a great fighting commander. He has taken the fleet in Lisbon to sea before. He takes it out in 1587. He goes to the Azores and back safely. But at this point, they come back so

damaged by a three-month excursion that they're not fit to set sail against England in 1587. Santa Cruz sickens. He dies. You have a fleet in Lisbon with no commander. Who is Philip II going to choose? Who is the guy who is expert in getting fleets to sea? And the only answer is Medina Sidonia. Why? Because yes, he's a grandee. Yes, he's very wealthy. Yes, he has enormous estates, but he also is the man who oversees the dispatch every year of the fleets going from Seville, or rather from Sanlúcar de Barraneda, which is the port at the end of the Guadalquivir River that leads to Seville and also where his castle is. So he is an expert in getting large fleets, and we're talking about 100, 120 ships, to sea. He is the obvious choice to send to Lisbon to get the Armada to sea, and he does it. Let's not forget, when the Armada puts to sea on the 28th of May, 1588, there are 130 ships. Not one of them has an accident. Not one of them is damaged. He sets forth. He has bad luck with the weather.

At this point, God does not smile on the Armada. They're driven back. They're hit by a storm. They put into Karana. Eventually, all of the ships get back to Karana, and on the 21st of July, 1588, they all get to sea again without a single accident. Nothing goes wrong. This guy is a genius at organizing, and he pulls the fleet together in a very short time. Where he is defective is in leading fleets into battle. He has commanded armies, he has been under fire, but he has not been under fire at sea. And Philip II doesn't seem to realize that the micromanager who is going to get the fleet to sea is probably not the same guy who is going to lead it in battle to victory. Right. So speaking of battle, the English come out

of Plymouth unharassed. They attack the Armada as it's going up the Channel. What is your thinking now on the damage inflicted by the English on that great crescent formation of the Armada as it sails up the Channel, past Portland, past the Isle of Wight, towards the Narrows? Well, it's extraordinarily little. One ship blows up, not thanks to the English. There's a massive explosion of powder. When you think about it, with the sailing ships, with powder out on the deck, firing sparks, etc., it's remarkable that there weren't more such accidents.

But one of the ships blows up. It happens to be one of the ships that's carrying 50,000 gold escudos, ready to pay the troops when they land in England. They are lost. The second ship is Nuestra Señora del Rosario, which is disabled in an accident. It's sailing to the rescue of another vessel and has a collision, loses it mass, and it has to surrender. So that's two ships down. A third ship gets separated from the fleet, goes too far ahead, waits in Le Havre, and misses it. The Armada sails on by and they don't see it. So Medina Sidonia is three ships down. The four galleys, they don't make it across the Bay of Biscay, so he's three ships and four galleys down, but he still anchors before Calais with almost all of his ships. So what we're looking at here

is a stalemate. He can't defeat the English. He can't get close to them and board, but the English can't break his order. He reorganizes it a little bit. They enter the channel in a crescent formation. But later on, the English sources agree that they go into a sort of round. They call it a plump. And the idea is that there's a vanguard and a rearguard. And if they're attacked from behind, the vanguard will go back through the fleet and will turn around and attack the English and board them. But of course, they don't have the sailing power to board the English. So it's a stalemate. In tactical terms, neither side has won. Does the Spanish obey King Philip's orders to the latter? You've mentioned the assault on Plymouth that they don't do. There was talk they could have

attacked the Isle of Wight and Caesar. Are there any other opportunities that you believe they missed, and indeed that certain Spanish commanders feel they missed on the way up towards Calais? I think the first missed opportunity is Plymouth. I do believe that if the Armada had headed for Plymouth, as Recalde and Alonso de la Iva suggest, argue vehemently, they would have caught the English fleet at its anchorage. The English can't get out because the tide is against them. This is where the famous story about Sir Francis Drake saying, we've time to finish our game of bowls and beat the Spaniards too. Even if he didn't say it, the point he makes is accurate. When the news arrives that the Spanish armada is coming, the English fleet is reprovisioning, it's rev revitalizing in Plymouth. It cannot get out until the tide turns, and then they have to warp the big ships out.

And because the Armada takes in sail, against the advice of Recalde and Laiva, the English fleet manages to get out and get around behind the Armada. So that's the first big missed opportunity. Really, the only other one is off the Isle of Wight. And there, goodness, the only other one is off the Isle of Wight. And there, goodness, the evidence is ambiguous. The English clearly don't want them to enter the Solent, and they maneuver in such a way that it would have been very difficult. But I have seen nothing in the documents to suggest that Medina Sidonia intended to do that. He has orders to get to Dunkirk, to do it as quickly as possible,

and he carries out those orders. Philip II is a micromanager. He does not delegate. And if we need another example in history of kings, monarchs, emperors, and führers micromanaging from the comfort of their own desk thousands of miles away from the battlefield, we've got another example here. So they arrive in Calais. How far away now are they from this army of veteran Spanish troops in the low countries? Too far. Too far for their own good. What the Duke of Medina Sidonia seems to have forgotten is that you can't just send a boat with a man, a messenger, and say, I'm coming. I'm almost there. You'll see me over the horizon. And expect that guy to get through the English ships in the

channel or to go to the coast of France and just happen to find networks of horses, relays of horses, which will take him all the way up to Parma's camp and say, right, they're on the way, get ready. The Duke of Medina Sidonia dispatches a messenger at the mouth of the channel on the 31st of July. He gets to Parma's headquarters on the 6th of August. That is the day when the Armada is off Calais. Later that day, he gets another messenger who says, they're off the Isle of Wight. And the next morning, he gets a message just saying, hey, we're at Calais. What are you doing? And Palmer has got very small ships. One of the chroniclers, in fact, he's a subaltern at the time in 1588,

a man called Carlos Coloma, who later writes his memoir, said we were packed into those boats like sardines. And that was the idea. The little ships, like Dunkirk, 1940, the little ships would be escorted across by the big warships, but it would be a rapid crossing. Palmer himself said it only takes eight hours to get across with good weather, and of course God will send us good weather. We do need, however, 36 hours to embark. He doesn't get that.

Palmer himself embarks almost all his troops within 36 hours. All he needed was those galeasses to defend the transit from the shore, from the ports, out to the heart of the Armada, and the Armada would then escort them across to Margate. But how long does Palmer get? Well, as I say, he hears that the Armada is in the channel on the 6th of August. He hears that it's off the Isle of Wight on the evening of the 6th of August. And the next day he hears that it's at Calais. So he really gets no time at all because that evening, the English realize that they have a problem, that they have not succeeded tactically, and that what they need to do is break that extraordinary discipline. And it is no fun. Dan, you're a sailing man, you know this. It is not easy to keep 130 ships in a regatta together without running into each other. How much more difficult is it when you have 130 ships of very different sailing abilities and sailing qualities and sizes to keep them together without colliding. And yet Medina Sidonia has done that. And the Armada still has teeth. A couple of vessels, a couple of English vessels, try their luck on the afternoon of the 7th of

August, and the Armada gives them a real blast, and they back off. So right up to that evening, blast and they'd back off. So right up to that evening, there is a tactical stalemate. The armada, all it has to do is wait. All the armada needs to do is wait in the sea off Calais. It can't anchor in Calais. There's too many ships. Calais is too small. It can't go to Dunkirk because of the sandbanks, but it can wait for Palmer to be ready to come out. And then it can send in these huge galley asses to bring 27,000 battle-hardened troops out to the fleet. And does Palmer even start embarking his troops? Yes, he does. And we know that because two sources. First of all, Medina Sidonia at Calais sends officials of increasing authority to ask, where the hell are you, Duke? And they all report he's there, and he's ready, and he's embarking. And Palmer himself realizes when the Armada leaves, and clearly the enterprise of England, as Philip II calls it, has clearly

failed. Palmer realizes that he is the number one suspect for screwing it up. And so he's very meticulous in putting together a dossier of documents and testimony. And everybody agrees that the embarkation began the minute he knew the Armada was ready to join hands, phrases, darse la mano, to join hands with him. The minute he knows that he starts embarkation, and they continue to embark, even as he can hear the guns firing in the decisive encounter off the port of Graveling, Gravelinga, on the 8th of August. Colin and I reckon that Palmer did his best. It was a foolish plan. He does his best. Philip II always suspects him of not having been ready. But really,

we complain about the Postal Service today. You should have been around in 1588. Given the Postal Service, there was no way this could have been coordinated. The Armada's success depends on the English doing everything wrong and the Armada doing everything right. And the Armada does do everything right up to that point. And the English still can't get the better of them. And if you want to get men sick very quickly in the early modern world, you stick them all together on small boats for an indefinite period of time. So there's no way in which Palmer can have them all sort of living on there for weeks on end. And indeed, that's part of his defence. I could

not embark them earlier because the ships were not made for that. These ships are just good for transportation. There's an interesting parallel here in 1688, when William of Orange invades England successfully. There's a lot of firsthand reports. And they all agree that when the men and the horses come ashore in Torbay, they basically spend the first two days vomiting on the beach. And a lot of the horses die. They can't walk. And they've been in transit for four days. And they're still pretty well knackered when they get ashore. The Armada guys, they would have been on those boats for several

hours. And the men coming from Spain have been on their ships for several months. They go from Lisbon to Carana, but they're not allowed to go ashore. So imagine what they would be like when they come ashore at Margate. It would have needed a certain amount of time to recover. TLC in the Garden of England. Now, let's talk about what the English can do to try and break up this powerful pack of the Armada. On that evening, the 7th, as Palmer is starting that embarkation, the English decide they don't want to wait. What do they do? There are two strategies that the English adopt on the 7th and the 8th of August. The first, which we all know, is sending in the fire ships. The second, which we also know,

is once the fire ships have broken up, which we also know is once the fire ships have broken up the order of the Spanish Armada, they're able to sail in, cut out one or two powerful warships and just pound them with artillery fire at very close range, using their superior sail plans and navigation familiarity to avoid being boarded. Colin Martin and I have worked out that the artillery, we think we know what happens there. The fire ships, it's been part of English strategy for a while. One of the forgotten heroes of 1588 is a man called William Winter. He commanded the Queen's fleet when they go to Scotland in 1559-1560 to prevent the Catholics taking over and to help a Protestant regime.

And they get orders to use fire ships, but they don't. We don't know where that idea comes from. It's an obvious one. You've got wooden ships. If you pack a few small vessels with combustibles and you put a loaded cannon on board and you steer it towards the fleet. But it's an interesting technique, and we don't know whether they've ever tried it before. But somebody on the English fleet knows what they're doing because they wait for the right moment when the tide is running from the English fleet to the Spanish fleet, and it runs quite quickly in the channel, as you know. Within 15 minutes of leaving the English fleet to the Spanish fleet. And it runs quite quickly in the channel, as you know. Within 15 minutes of leaving the English fleet, they're in among the Spanish fleet. There's eight

fire ships. The Spaniards are expecting it. They've been warned that this will be a tactic used. And there are some very brave men in small boats who tow two of the fire ships out of danger. small boats who tow two of the fire ships out of danger. The rest of the fire ships go towards the fleet and Medina Sidonia orders them all to buoy their anchors or cut their anchors and get out to sea. The fire ships destroy nothing. What they do is disorder the Spanish Armada and the English then go in for the kill the next morning without giving them a chance to regroup. But where the fireship idea comes from, where the expertise of using fireships come from, I cannot yet tell you. Maybe I will find more documents, but I haven't yet got them. But I can tell you about the gunnery.

If you listen to Dan Snow's history, we're talking about the Armada all coming up millions dead a higher proportion of civilian casualties than in the second world war America Britain Russia and China all involved in a conflict that technically remains active to this day so why is the Korean war of 1950-53 called the Forgotten War? The North Koreans and the South Koreans, even today in the 2020s, they're still officially at war. This July, we're dedicating a special series of episodes to finding out what this unique conflict was all about. From the halls of power... I've seen documents in the last week where the British chiefs of staff are telling Clement Attlee this might lead to World War III.

This might be a nuclear war. To the battlefront. During the Korean War, the ship fired its guns far more than it ever did in the whole of the Second World War. Because that's what we were doing, day in, day out. Join me, James Rogers, throughout July on the Warfare podcast from History Hit. As we remember the war the world forgot. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga.

And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. The Spanish fleet sort of scatters in that they want to avoid getting set on fire, obviously, by these ships. So as the sun comes up on the following morning,

the Spanish that had been locked together in this, almost like a Roman testudo, like a little great mass of ships, impenetrable mass, is now strung along the coast of what is today northern France, even into the Belgian coast. And so they are rich picking. Suddenly the English can bring great numbers to bear on individual Spanish ships.

I do like that testudo image, Dan. I wish we'd used it in the book. Yes, the English get in there, but the question is, why are they able to dodge in and out, fire a broadside, turn around, fire their stern guns, which are always the biggest, give the other side, then turn around while they're reloading and fire the other front guns and do it again and again and again. Two of the major warships, the Portuguese galleons, are destroyed beyond repair. And several other ships are so badly mauled that they are taking on water. And later on, although they escape from the battle, they will sink on the way home.

But why is it that the English do this? And why didn't they do it before? We have our theory. It involves our man Drake. And it involves that ship I mentioned at the beginning, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, which is captured by Drake himself. And he goes on board. He takes command. The Rosario is a big ship. It's heavily armed.

It's commanded by one of the 10 generals of the Spanish Armada. Drake is fluent in Spanish, and he has the commander, whose name is Don Pedro de Valdez. He eats with him. Valdez is allowed to sleep in Drake's cabin. And my theory is that they look very carefully at this huge Armada galleon, and they figure out that although it can fire its guns once, they have long trails behind. They have no discipline or practice in reloading and refiring. So in a combat, they figure out that the Spanish can fire once, but they're not going to fire again anytime soon. And so in the battle, which you mentioned off the Solent, Drake and some other ships attack two or three ships and do exactly the same thing. They use their guns, they go round and round, almost disabling

it. And they, I think, reassure themselves that although the Armada has 2,491 big guns, most of them are only going to fire once. So once they've fired that initial round, the Armada ships are sitting ducks, provided the English don't go close enough. Because the Spanish doctrine would have been what? To give someone a massive broadside, to close with them, grapple them, and then launch your borders across, your sort of infantrymen across to fight it out with cold steel. Right. They're seeing it essentially as a souped up galley. Or if you like a modern image, it's like a fighter aircraft. A modern

fighter aircraft has all its guns at the front. So you have to align the whole fighting platform before you can attack. The galley is the same. All its artillery is at the front. So you have to line it up, you fire, and then you board. And the Spanish naval doctrine in 1588 is you line the big guns up at the front. This is the advantage of the crescent formation. All your guns are pointing forward. And you then can attack the English and then you board. What they have not worked out is the English have a better sail plan, better navigational skills, better control, and they are able to steer away from the Spanish ships and avoid being boarded. And so in this battle in which the Spanish are fighting now in ones and twos, the English can get amongst them, dwell, spend more time

pounding individual Spanish ships and causing real damage? They do. The battle goes on for nearly 12 hours. It starts around dawn on the 8th of August, 1588. At the decisive battle, the English really move in, and they move in at dawn, and they keep on firing away until it seems to us that they are out of ammunition. The man I mentioned, Sir William Winter, he's been in the narrow seas. He's been based on Dover. So he hasn't seen the battles coming up the channel. So this is new to him. But he writes at the end of the battle, you know, he said, out of my ship, we fired 500 rounds, most of them cannon and demi-culverin, really big guns. And when we were firing, we were within hailing distance. Well, think about that. In the noise of battle,

hailing distance is very close indeed. And if you fire a 40-pounder gun at another ship at hailing distance, you are going to do real damage. And actually, Dan, I have to say, it was you who taught me that. You and I were involved in a BBC series called 12 Days to Save England. And one of the things you did was to get the Master of Majesty's Armory to go with you with a mock-up four-pounder gun. Do you remember the scene where you fire it at thick wood planks? And from a distance, it does no damage at all. And a bit closer on, you try it again, and it does very little damage or it misses. But when you get it close, it goes right through and you say, wow, well, that's a four-pounder. Just imagine what a 40-pounder would do. So I learned a lot from that particular recreation

that you did. Well, Geoffrey, I can now go and die in peace. No moment in my future life is going to rival that. I'm so happy. So again, contrary to this idea that the Spanish were defeated by the weather, the Spanish fleet at the end of the Battle of Graveline, many of their best ships are now seriously battered, are they? Does a ship sink or do any ship sink? But we need to think of them as badly damaged. One ship sinks. It's Biskayen Marie Juan, it's called. And she goes down just as they're trying to rescue the crew. They're negotiating with the English. And as they say, as we were in speech of one another, the ship sails and only one boatload is saved. Probably 300 men. There's a

report later on of 300 corpses floating in the sea. And it's thought that those were the men who were on this ship. Most of them, of course, couldn't swim. Soldiers are recruited from the middle of Spain. Why would you need to swim? So that's the only one. Two big Portuguese galleons are so badly beaten up that they sail into the coast of what is now Belgium and are captured. One of the big galleasses runs aground because its rudder breaks, and it's captured too. Howard the Commander sort of detaches himself from the English fleet and spends the whole time trying to loot that wreck, doesn't he? What books have you been reading recently, Dan? I've emphasised these galley asses because you just can't leave one behind.

I mean, these are 50-gun ships. They're the one type of vessel in the Armada, which is indeed capable of firing multiple rounds. It has 50 pounder guns, even bigger than the English have. And yes, it runs aground in Calais, but you know, it runs aground. You sail, you can get a ship off when it runs aground. So Howard sees this enormous warship. It'd be like seeing an aircraft carrier disabled. Do you leave it behind and say, oh no, we'll go after the rest? No, you don't. You go back and you make sure it's never, ever going to sail again. Well, yes, a certain amount of looting does take place, Dan, I grant you that.

At this point, there are four English squadrons and Howard's squadron stays behind and makes sure the Gallias will never sail again. The other three squadrons go in and do terrible damage to the rest of the fleet. But Medina Sidonia, okay, you can count them up. He still has 120 ships. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans,

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wherever you get your podcasts. The Armada now faces two dangers. The first is it's been disordered, but not totally defeated. It's a defeat, but it's not a disaster. But they are heading for the shoals, those enormous sandbanks, which lurk off the coast of Flanders and Holland and the Maus of the Scheldt.

And God breathes again because the wind changes at the critical moment and blows them out into the North Sea and saves them from this. Right. The weather saves the Spanish Armada at this point. As I've learned from your brilliant book, it's unbelievable. How dare people say that the weather destroyed the Armada? Well, actually, of course, the weather does both. But it is extraordinary that God breathes and saves the Armada at this point. Yep. And they're all praying. They're all confessing. We have the accounts. I've now put together quite a lot of relatively new accounts, two of them by priests. The Armada has 180 priests on board. And those who survive write accounts

about it. And they all say, you know, that night we all thought we were going to die. We all thought that we are heading for the sandbanks and we're going to drown. None of us could swim. We all thought we were going down. And then the wind changed. It was a miracle. And we would call it a miraculous deliverance too. But when they get out into the North Sea, they are disordered. And Medina Sidonia tries to regroup them. That's the second challenge. Remember I said there were two. The first is getting off from the banks of Flanders. The second is regrouping. And a number of ships, having escaped from the banks of Flanders, keep sailing north. And Medina Sidonia is not pleased.

And so he fires a gun and they keep on sailing north. And so he sends some of these fast faluas, these little rowing vessels to bring them back. And in the end, 20 captains are brought on board the flagship. And we now have an account of what happens next. The Duke lines them up and says, didn't you hear me fire the gun? And they said, yes. up and says, didn't you hear me fire the gun? And they said, yes. And he said, well, why didn't you come back? And he said, oh, we thought you were firing guns because you were sinking and we should save ourselves. And then, says the account, there's a long pause, and Medina says, hang the traitors. In the end, some of the friars, some of the priests intercede. But in the end, he does hang one of them. He hangs one of the captains, a man called Cristobal de Ávila, and he hangs him from his own yardarm.

And you know, for a gentleman, if you misbehave, if you're caught out, if you're accused of cowardice, you're executed, your head is chopped off. It is a vile punishment to be hanged. So the fact that this guy is a captain, he's Don Cristobal de Ávila, he's a gentleman, he's from Andalusia, he's Medina Sidonia's neighbor, and the fact that he is strung up on the Ardarm and paraded around the fleet and says to the rest of them, you know, you leave me again, busters, and this is what's going to happen to you. Again, Medina Sidonia shows enormous courage under fire, and it's his first time. He shows enormous skill in regrouping the fleet, so it is once again

a coherent force of around 110 ships. And it proceeds in good order as far as the Firth of Forth. And at that point, the English decide that they are going to disengage, and they do that for two reasons. Number one, they're running out of ammunition. When William Winter said he fired 500 rounds in the course of the battle, he goes on to say, and I'm out. I have no more. No powder, no shot. The second is there's disease on the English ships. They've been at sea on and off for seven months on a crowded space, and they're beginning to go down with dysentery. And Howard reckons if he doesn't's now off the coast of Scotland. And the English fleet can do nothing to intercept it or to stop it. Had the Armaghs decided to invade Newcastle, they would have been able to put men ashore, but they don't. In the end, they decide to go back to Spain via the Atlantic route, Scotland and the west coast of Ireland. And they're beset by autumnal storms, which come early and many of them sink., and they're beset by autumnal storms which come early and many of them sink. Why do they head north? Why do they go back to Spain at that point?

After he's hanged Cristóbal de Ávila and condemned the other captains to lose their commands, and some of them are, what we would say, remanded in custody on the prison ship, Medina Sidonia convenes his council of war, or what's left of them. I mean, several of the generals have been killed or captured. The commander of the Galliases is shot in the head, dies with a bullet in his brain on the flag gallias off Calais. Pedro de Valdes is captured by Francis Drake. So the surviving commanders meet together and the Duke says, what do we do now? And they all say, we'll go again. So we'll go again. Let's reform and go back to Flanders and pick up the Duke of Parma and his

merry men. And Medina Sidonia says, yes, we'll do that. But I have to tell you, if the wind is against us as it is now, we're going to have to go back to Spain. Let's wait for 24 hours to see if the wind changes. And if not, we only have one exit strategy. We can't go back through the channel. We've seen what the English have done. He, of course, does not know that the English are out of powder and shot. But he says, we can't do this again. We can't go into battle with them again because we're going to lose. We can, however, go north around the north of Scotland, around the west of Ireland, and steering clear of all land, we will get back to Spain that way. How many Spanish ships make it back?

As far as we can tell, and as I say, this Batalla del Mar Oceano Volume 5, with its biography of ships, makes it much easier to make that estimate. Two-thirds of the ships eventually get back to Spain, but some of them are in such bad state that they don't last very long. Two more flagships, the Regassona, which is a very large merchantman, Venetian merchantman, eventually docks in a little port called Mouros in Galicia. And the Duke of Medina Sidonia says, I want you at Carana and I want you now. And the commander says, but sir, your grace, it's not good to do this journey in November and December. And they insist, and of course, it sinks.

So there's another one down. The flagship of Recalde, the San Juan of Portugal, is in Carana, but it's so badly damaged that it has to be repaired. And in May 1589, Sir Francis Drake arrives with a counter armada, and they burn it and destroy it. So there's another shit down. So if you add all those together, and the galley asses and the galleys and the ships that sink on the coast of Ireland, as far as I can tell, two thirds get back to Spain, but some of them are in very bad shape.

I must just ask quickly about the myth of the Armada in terms of Britain's journey towards global hegemony, maritime greatness, the kind of Whiggish version of history in which the Armada is somehow a starting point. Does the Armada matter in the relative maritime strength of this vast Spanish empire and England? maritime strength of this vast Spanish empire and England? There's two questions there. One is what it does to the victors and what it does to the vanquished, which is the second question. May I tackle the victors first? Us, chaps five, Spaniards no. It seems to me that the English have a wonderful opportunity in 1589 to finish off the Spanish Armada, which is those two-thirds of the ships, so badly damaged that most of them have their guns ashore, their sails are down,

their crews are dispersed, their crews are sick. Francis Drake has orders to go and destroy them, and he disobeys. It's mainly because Elizabeth has spent all her money. England is bankrupt, and so she has to go to private backers. And the private backers, of course, have no interest in destroying the remnants of the Armada. They want booty. So Drake goes off, he hits Carana, he destroys the shipping he can find there. And then instead of going along the ports of northern Spain to destroy the rest of the Armada ships, he goes to Lisbon to try and seize Lisbon to make it an English outpost, and he fails. So he doesn't destroy the armada. He doesn't capture Lisbon. He doesn't get any more treasure ships. It is a miserable failure, and it gives

Spain a chance to recover. I don't think you can see the Armada as being the beginning of English naval hegemony. The next year is a catastrophe, and England is then at war until 1603, until Elizabeth dies. And the money spent on the fleet, on defense, on repressing a rebellion in Ireland, which is Philip's riposte, he fosters a very successful rebellion in Ireland, which Elizabeth has to put down. So it really is what we call, I think, a pyrrhic victory. It's an enormous tactical success, but in strategic terms, it changes very little. And you could say the same for Spain. There are enormous losses, both qualitative and quantitative. Most of the

commanders either die or are in captivity. Probably half of the men who sailed on the Armada from Lisbon in May 1588 do not see Christmas. They do not live to celebrate Christmas. Either they die on the ships or they die soon afterwards. I found an interesting medical report from the university hospital at Salamanca, the leading medical facility in Spain at the time. The doctor writes to the king, to King Philip II, and says, you know, these people coming off the Armada, I've never seen anything like it. They all started to die. They have contagious diseases.

They all started to die. They have contagious diseases. We did an autopsy, and their internal organs're not allowed to dress yourself in black and dress your house in black unless it's an immediate relative. And the reason for that is all of Madrid, all of Spain goes into mourning. As one of the priests at the Escorial, one of the boosters of Philip II says, you know, this is the worst disaster to strike Spain in 700 years. Figuring back, what he has in mind is the Muslim conquest of 711. So this is a catastrophe, but it does not end the war. Spain keeps on fighting. It doesn't win either. So in tactical terms, it's exciting. It's brilliant. It appears to be decisive, but as with so many victories, it doesn't end the war. The war goes on. The war will go on. In fact, until James VI, the much-rivaled James VI, when he comes to the throne in 1603, one of his first acts is to say, right, there's a ceasefire.

No more attacks. No more privateering. No more hospitilists against Spain. I, King of Scotland, have never had a quarrel with Spain, and you are not going to either. Now I'm King of England. It's got to stop. He starts negotiations for peace. The Peace of London is signed a year later, but Hostilis is ceased within a month of Jane's coming to the

throne. And that is the end of the war that starts with the Spanish Armada. From all of your research, what other reasons have you found, do you think, that explains Spain's defeat? Well, I suppose the most interesting new dimension, there's a little section called Men Behaving Badly. And I did research on the Spanish commanders and the senior officers, all these dukes and marquises and counts and princes who sail with the armada. All of them are knights of one of Spain's military orders. And in order to become a knight, to get a knighthood, it works like this. The king, Philip II, is the grandmaster of the

three orders of chivalry, and there's only three in Spain. And he makes a nomination, and it goes to the Council of the Orders, Consejo de las Ordenes. And the Council of the orders then sends off a friar and a knight to all the places where the nominee has lived and they interview people who know them to make sure of one of four different conditions first of all are they legitimate are they descended from jews of course have they or their ancestors had anything to do with the Inquisition? Of course. Have they worked for a living? These characteristics are called tachas, stains, and it is astonishing how many of them have tachas or stains. The Duke of Medina Sidonia, his grandmother, the daughter of an archbishop. Okay, so the archbishop was the illegitimate son

of Ferdinand of Aragon. When Philip II calls him cousin, he really is his cousin. Don Pedro de Valdez, who I mentioned, the man on the Rosario, he is the grandson of two fornicating priests. Others have ancestors who were before the Inquisition, suspected of heresy. One of the boldest and bravest commanders, Miguel de Oquendo, worked for a living. He owns two ships and he trades at Cadiz. And there is a mobilized campaign by the town where he lives to prevent him getting a knighthood. So, I mean, why do these guys get knighthoods? Because the king has to write to the Pope and get a special dispensation. Okay, so the guy worked for a living, but nevertheless, he can have his knighthood. And you may say that if Philip II entrusted his armada to do God's work

and entrusted it to all these losers, all these men who've been behaving badly, no wonder it failed. God is not going to smile on people whose forebears were fornicating priests. That makes sense. Or worked for a living. Ah, goodness me.ffrey parker thank you very much for coming on it's been a pleasure dan always a pleasure to see you and speak with you thanks for your interest in armada i feel we have the history on our shoulders all this tradition of ours our school history our songs this part of the history of our country, all of our gods. you