Dan Snow's History Hit - The Spanish Armada

Episode Date: August 1, 2021

In 1588 the English Navy defeated one of the greatest fleets ever assembled; the Spanish Armada. A week of running battles in the English Channel culminated in a major clash off the coast of the town of Gravelines (now in France) where the English used fire ships to score a crushing naval victory against the Spanish fleet. This is one of the most famous naval clashes in history but how was the Armada beaten? Dan tells the story of this titanic naval clash where superior English seamanship, new ship designs and new ideas about fighting at sea paved the way for victory. He also explores the misconceptions about the role the weather played in the fighting; and whether in fact, it benefitted the Spanish possibly preventing an even greater disaster for them. Victory over the Armada became a founding myth of the Royal Navy and would inspire seafarers, naval commanders and political leaders for generations to come.Earlier this week Alexander Samson joined the podcast for the first of two podcasts about the armada and the relationship between England and Spain. You can listen to that episode here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This week in 1588, the English Navy defeated the Spanish Armada after a series of running battles culminated in a major clash off the town of Graveline which now sits just inside the French border with Belgium. Contrary to what you might be told, it was a crushing naval victory. The weather, if anything, actually benefited the Spanish during the course of this week in 1588. Subsequently, as the battered, ill, starving survivors in their battle-damaged ships headed round Scotland and Ireland, then of course

the weather turned against them. Terrible gales drove surviving ships onto the rocky west coast of Scotland, Antrim, Donegal, and it was a shadow of the mighty force which had left Iberia in the summer of 1588 that staggered back into Santander in September of that year. It's one of the great epics of naval history. It was probably the largest, heaviest fleet ever sent into the western Atlantic at that time. It was defeated by a combination of great English seafarers, men like Hawkins, Drake, Frobisher, and their commander Howard. New ship designs and new ideas about how to fight war at sea. It's a really important story in the development of modern naval warfare. It's

also an important story in the development of the myth of English and British exceptionism. It's become a founding myth of the English and British empires. For the first time, people dared to think perhaps God was on their side. God was an Englishman. And it would inspire and provoke English seafarers, statesmen, writers, for generations to come. As a result, we've already had the pod out this week in which we talked about the background, Anglo-Spanish competition. But today is the story of the Spanish Armada featuring me. You know, when I started out as a podcaster, I always promised I wouldn't be that guy, that strange middle-aged guy who's monologued shouting into his own microphone for hours on end about history. Today, I'm that strange middle-aged guy monologuing, shouting for

hours on end into a microphone about history because it's me folks it's me telling the story of the spanish armada hope you enjoy it i live overlooking all the sites where the armada clash with the english navy i can just about see the stretch of water now from my window as i'm talking to you the second program i ever made to bbc when i was 23 years old was the spanish armada i've then made subsequent other programs i've sailed the waters i've sailed the ships i've been to the archives and seen the documents. So I do know a little bit about Spanish Armada, and it's great to be able to share the story with you. We are running a special offer at the moment on History Hit TV. We've got lots of naval history on there, lots of TV shows, lots of back episodes of this podcast. If you want to go to historyhit.tv, use the code Armada, A-R-M-A-D-A, Armada, you get the first three months

for 50% off. For the price of a pint of beer, less in fact, you just get History Hit TV every month for three months. Unbelievable. It's a sweet deal. It's the world's best history channel. Tens of thousands of people are subscribing. Thank you to all of you. I never believed back in the day, 20 years ago, that I would run to have my own TV channel and be talking about Spanish Armada. Very lucky guy. Thank you to you all. But before you go and take advantage of that offer, here is me talking about the Spanish Armada. Enjoy. It must have been an unforgettable sight. 3pm on the 29th of July 1588. Imagine you're a little way off Lizard Point, Cornwall, off the Lizard, the great headland that stretches down into the western approaches. One of the greatest

invasion fleets ever to be launched in the history of the world is now arrayed across the horizon. As that fleet came in 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 its leader. There were 120 of them, 120 ships, each with the red cross of a religious crusade on their white weather-beaten sails. Around 30,000 men were 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 tons, a great galleon, hoisted a huge banner, a mighty banner, stretched from the top mast right down to the waterline. On it was an image of the crucifixion of the Virgin Mary, Mary Magdalene kneeling before the cross. It was a banner that had been blessed by the Pope himself. This was a holy crusade confident in the support of God himself. And the Spanish Empire and its leader, Philip II of Spain, was God's chosen instrument to deal with the wicked, heretic woman. A man who ruled half the world had come to destroy a woman who ruled half an island. But things wouldn't

quite go to plan, as we'll see. But let's go back. We heard in the podcast a few days ago, the interview with the excellent Alexander Sampson about some of the background, some of the rivalry between England and Spain in this period. Just in case you missed that episode, England and Spain were both Atlantic powers and discovery by Europeans of this new world, of the Americas, a hundred years before the Armada sailed, had ignited a gigantic competition between England, Spain, but other powers like France, the Netherlands, Portugal, had ignited a gigantic competition between England, Spain, but other powers like France, the Netherlands, Portugal, of course, to exploit, to extract value from the New World, to transport enslaved Africans to the New World, to bring back the commodities of the New

World, to try and dominate this new Atlantic space. This competition was given a savage ideological religious edge by the Reformation, which saw the Dutch, and English in particular, embrace the schism within the church and embrace Protestant ideas. So now the bitter divisions were fuelled not only by cash and desire for national prestige and power, but also religion. It was a toxic combination. Philip II of Spain emerged as one of the leading figures of the Catholic world, possibly the leading figure. He ruled over a massive empire, particularly massive, because at that point he was ruling over Portugal. The Portuguese royal family had died out, stuttered to a finish, and so Philip claimed the mantle of King of Portugal Portugal which meant that his empire was not

only Spain and Portugal but the Low Countries, what is now large parts of Belgium and the Netherlands, Southern Italy, Sicily, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, the Caribbean Islands, over into Indonesia, enclaves in Southern Africa, West Africa and the Indian Ocean as well. Philip II of Spain looked like God was on his side. He'd smashed the Turkish in the Mediterranean, the Battle of the Panto. He seemed to have halted the Ottoman-Turkish advance into Christendom for a generation. And his great obsession was collecting religious or saintly relics in his giant Oscorial Palace in Madrid. He had something like 7,500 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

if his son was a heretic, he would carry the wood to burn him himself. And that religious zealotry was probably exacerbated by the fact that his most difficult control subjects proved to be the Protestant ones. The Netherlands was in a full-scale revolt against Spanish rule. Philip had sent an army there almost 20 years before the Armada, and they were fighting just an attritional, savage war in that low-lying, boggy, very difficult-to-operate environment. You needed special ships with shallow drafts. You needed a never-ending supply of men as the marshy, disease-ridden Low Countries just swallowed up armies. And the mud-strewn trenches of the endless sieges ground armies into dust. And that is really where Philip and Elizabeth

fell out. There were lots of causes for Philip and Elizabeth falling out, but the roles in the Low Countries is the main one. I'll just come back in a sec, because we've got to remember, Philip had once been Elizabeth's brother-in-law. He'd married Mary I, the first queen regnant in English history. She, known subsequently to some as Bloody Mary, she'd attempted to reintroduce Catholicism after the reign of her father 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, he had recommended that Mary build lots of ships.

He said the safeguard of England is in its navy. And so really the strength of Elizabeth I's navy that she inherited off her older sister is in some part thanks to her first royal brother-in-law, Philip of Spain. And he would learn to regret that investment in the English navy. When Mary had died, 1558, he had proposed to her successor. He didn't let Protestantism get in the way there. Philip had suggested Elizabeth marry him instead. She had rejected him, which probably hadn't helped their relationship. It went further on the slide when Elizabeth allowed buccaneers, pirates, privateers, adventurers, you call them whatever you like,, people like John Hawkins who in 1563 crossed the Atlantic with Elizabeth's backing. He took his young cousin by the way, Francis Drake,

do some trade in the Spanish empire. They took a cargo of enslaved Africans, they attempted to sell them in Mexico but the Spanish fleet found them, turned on them and defeated the English fleet. Francis Drake, the young man, escaped but was left with a burning hatred of Spaniards and plotted 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 but slightly private investor, he went on a circumnavigation of the world. He was the first Englishman to do so, led the second expedition that had ever succeeded in sailing around the world. He was the first Englishman to do so, led the second expedition that had ever succeeded in sailing around the world. And it was basically part exploration and part a massive and prolonged raid on Spanish possessions. Ships were captured, towns, cities, settlements were burned.

It was a huge provocation to Philip and it was a grave blow at the heart of the Spanish empire. But curiously, it wasn't that that actually led to war between Philip and Elizabeth. That was, as I say, coming back to the Netherlands. In September 1585, Elizabeth took a huge step of sending troops to the continent to help the Dutch rebels. She did not wish to see Catholic Spain reassert its control over the Low Countries. With all the implications that would mean for the ports that took British trade into Europe and the ports that would enable invasion fleets to be assembled to attack England. Don't forget, Elizabeth's grandfather, Henry VII, had invaded England and Wales to capture the throne. And the Tudors had a long memory and were very nervous about somebody else repeating the trick that brought them to the throne.

So for both of those reasons, for trade and geography, Elizabeth was keen to keep the Protestant Dutch independent and free of Spanish control. The 6,000 men that she sent was a provocation that this time the Spanish could not ignore. Philip initially wanted to replace Elizabeth with her cousin, Mary Queen of Scots, who was a good Catholic. When she was executed in 1587, that further enraged Philip, further encouraged him to send his expedition to England but it meant that he had to place himself on the throne or possibly his daughter Isabella on the throne of England as a puppet. By the way Philip made decision to invade England and get rid of this heretic

traitorous 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, told to gather in Cadiz. Elizabeth decided that she would intercept this fleet. She would strike before they had a chance to sail. And so in April 1587, an English fleet appeared off Cadiz in southern Spain. And the rumour flew around town immediately that it was El Draque. It was Drake. And they were right. It was.

Drake sailed into Cadiz. He attacked the Spanish fleet at its moorings. He burnt ships down to the waterline. He smashed up the quayside, the walls. The English had the run of the town for critical hours. And they were able to do a huge amount of damage. He sailed off from Cadiz, he laid waste to the coast. It sounds unglamorous but he managed to destroy one convoy that was

carrying wooden barrel staves which were essential barrels with the long-distance food transportation technology of the era. There was of course no jars, no freezer units, no refrigeration at all, so good solid tight barrels were their best bet for preserving food and water for the long haul and Drake did terrible damage to Spanish ambitions by destroying a huge number of these seasoned wooden staves for barrels. As Drake headed north back to England he wrote to Queen Elizabeth and said, I dare not almost write of the great forces we hear the King of Spain hath. Prepare in England most strongly and most by sea. Drake was absolutely right. Throughout British history there's been a tension between investing in ships and investing

in shore fortifications. You can either fight the enemy when they're at sea or you try and stop them when they land. Drake was of course correct. Ships are far better bet. Waiting for someone to arrive and land before you engage them is a very inefficient way of stopping invasion. Sending your ships out to sea to interdict that fleet, an invading fleet, when the enemy troops are all knackered after weeks at sea, scurvy, seasick, before they've had a chance to deploy onto land, when they're trussed up in these battleships. Think one troops transport ship or a battleship. They destroy a lot more artillery and men very, very easily than you can do once they land. So Drake was absolutely right. Prepare most strongly by sea. And within the confines of the Tudor state, they did just that. I've been to National Archives and

I've looked at documents that show how the late Tudor state, Elizabeth's Tudor state, was trying to take a rigorous, very modern approach to mobilization. Every sailor on the Thames, for example, this one document I looked at, they were listed, their home address, their skill set. Were they ferrymen? Were they fishermen? Were they capable of undertaking long sea journeys? And the idea was that you could then mobilize those people when the time came. You don't have to pay them to keep them in your books the whole time, but you could, in the event of invasion, dash around, knock on their door and say, right, mate, you're up. And so the Tudor state was responding to this. The germ of the navy, a force that would grow into one of the most dominant military forces in history, was being nurtured, was sprouting,

was turning into a little sapling. Anyway, that's enough of that metaphor. Anyway, this is the beginnings of a centuries-long story of excellence within the Royal Navy. Meanwhile, back in Spain, there was an argument. Fleets were reassembled, ships were found, men were found. There was a debate about how exactly to deal with Elizabeth. Should they just embark enough troops to just invade, land in Devon, Cornwall, Hampshire, march London, get rid of Elizabeth? Or should you take advantage of the existing army, the one that was in the Low Countries, led by the Duke of Parma, Philip's brilliant nephew, that was attempting to crush the rebellion in the Low Countries, should you sail a fleet up the Channel, pick up that army, and then whiz across the Straits of

Dover and land in Kent? Broadly speaking, they opted for the second decision. They sent a well equipped fleet with artillery and some reinforcements and supplies, but basically they opted to go and pick up Parma in the Low Count countries and bring him across to England. Now there was a fundamental problem with that plan and that was picking someone up in a boat. Those of you who are boat owners will know that oh just meet me around here I'll jump on the boat is a lot easier said than done. You've actually got to transport an army from its bases in what is now Belgium to the coast onto ships waiting out at sea. Well, for that, you need a port. If you don't have a port, you need a very, very safe anchorage, and you need a huge number of flat-bottom boats, boats that basically get into the shore,

beetling in and out, transferring troops and artillery from shore to ship. That force was not available. To make matters even worse, there was no port. France was technically neutral. You couldn't just march in, grab Calais and use that as an embarkation port. And the Dutch and what we now call Belgian ports that were in Spanish hands were blockaded by Dutch rebels, sailing in light, brilliantly constructed craft that knew the narrows, the shoal-strewn shallows of the Rhine estuary like no one else. So the Spanish force actually had no way of making it onto the Armada when the Armada arrived, which experienced veterans knew. One senior officer in the Spanish fleet said to a

papal envoy, we sail in confident hope of a miracle, because he knew logistics weren't in place to shift Palmer's army onto the Spanish Armada when and if it arrived off the coast of the Low Countries. This very very complicated amphibious operation was not helped by the fact the commander of the Armada might have been the richest and most powerful feudal lord in Spain and he was a brilliant administrator but his man had never really been to sea before. In fact, he wrote to Philip and he said he didn't want to serve. He wrote to King's secretary and said, I quote, I'm seasick and always catch 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 obliged to rely on the advice of others without knowing good from bad. Even

the Duke of Medina Sidonia's mother did not think he was up to the job. Philip II ignored the pleas of the Duke of Medina Sidonia and he was appointed to command the Armada, a position left vacant on the 9th of February 1588 by the death of Spain's premier admiral, Santa Cruz. The great seafarer and warrior, it was a poor choice, but not immediately so. Medina Salonia was an extraordinarily able administrator, and he managed to remarkably get this fleet together, stockpile the food, deal with jealous subordinates, and assemble a vast number of ships. And so, in May 1588, the Duke of Medici and the senior officers of the fleet went to the cathedral in Lisbon and took the expedition's sacred banner from the altar.

Every man made a confession. The ships were checked for women that had been hidden aboard. The brothel ship that usually accompanied expeditions like this was left behind as inconsistent with going on crusade. There was to be no blasphemy, no gambling, no feuding, and no swearing. I wonder how that enforcement went. At daybreak, every day the ship's boys would sing Ave Maria and Salve. On the 28th of May, what the Spanish called the Holy Enterprise glided out of Lisbon. And I think the Duke of Medina could have taken some solace that first night in the Atlantic as presumably he lay prostrate in his bunk from seasickness, that he had managed to get the Armada to sea. The fact that the rest of the mission would require a miracle must have been a bit disturbing.

the rest of the mission would require a miracle must have been a bit disturbing. Waiting in England was the English navy. It was not a royal navy as we understand it today of course but even in subsequent centuries. It was a fleet assembled for a short term by the monarch of England Elizabeth I. Some were her ships that she had paid for, but most were armed merchant ships, effectively, contracted for the duration of the campaign. In command was not Sir Francis Drake, but Charles Howard, 2nd Baron Effingham. He was 52 years old. He was a cousin of Queen Elizabeth, and very like Medina Stonia, he had been appointed for his royal and aristocratic connections. However, unlike Medina Stonia, he took to it with enormous enthusiasm. He made it his business to inspect every ship in his fleet. He said he was much

more comfortable sleeping aboard than he was in his own bed at home, and he turned himself into a possible naval commander. He was blessed in some respects with his subordinates. This generation of buccaneering adventurers, people like Francis Drake and Hawkins, who knew their business. So Francis Drake was induced to accept the role of second in command, I think probably for the only time in his entire career. And men like John Hawkins, whose ship designs had revolutionized fighting at sea. Martin Frobisher, a pirate slave trader who would command the Thousand Tonne Triumph, which was the largest ship in the English fleet. Howard and Drake moved to Plymouth to wait for the Armada, leaving another squadron of the English 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 commanded by the Duke of Parma. Inevitably, when a large fleet of wooden ships puts the sea into the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, there are complications. The Armada struggled to reach England. There was a great storm they had to put into northern Spain, and they didn't leave Corunna until the 21st of July. A week later, after a journey across the more placid Biscay, they sighted the Lizard. The phony war had come to an end. The world's great superpower had arrived off England's coast. Many people will have heard of the famous story of Drake playing bowls on Plymouth High. They still play bowls up to this day, which is a gift to documentary makers like me, because you can film pieces to camera about the 16th century with

people playing bowls in exactly the same place that Drake played bowls 500 years ago. The apocryphal story goes that Drake was playing bowls when news arrived the Spanish Armada was off the lizard. There's no way of sailing ships to get out of Plymouth Harbour if the wind is contrary and the tide is against you. So he said, well, we have time to finish the game and beat the Spanish too. This could be true. We don't know.

The story is not reported for some time afterwards. But it disguises the fact that the English were in trouble. If the Spanish had made a beeline for Plymouth, they could have bottled up the English fleet, they could have landed before the English fleet got to sea, and it would have been perhaps a very different outcome. Instead, the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, remember, a man who did not have the confidence in his own decision-making, decided to stick to the letter of his orders from his sovereign. He was not to attempt an invasion himself. He was meant to stick to the letter of his orders from his sovereign. He was not to attempt an invasion himself, he was meant to go to the Low Countries to collect the Duke of Parma.

Medina Sidonia's two most experienced subordinates, Juan Martinez de la Calde and Don Alonso de Leva, urged the admiral to sail instantly into Plymouth to strike at the viper's nest. But Medina Sidonia refused and urged a far more stately procession of the armada up the channel. A huge opportunity had been missed. Sometimes you're too busy waiting for a miracle to notice the one that presents itself. As soon as the tide turned, the English ships desperately put to sea. They clawed their way out, rowing boats pulling the great ships out into Plymouth Sound. As soon as they could, getting their sails up, tacking to get out to sea, get the windward gauge that's called to be upwind of the enemy fleet, which is the key thing to do when you're fighting in a sailing fleet action.

And by the morning of the 30th of July, the day after the Armada had been spotted, 55 English ships were at sea, heavily outnumbered, of course, about two to one at this stage by the Armada. That's why Dragan Howe made this interesting decision that he did now, which is they put themselves to wind with the Spanish fleet. If you're upwind of the enemy, you can control the tempo, the position, the timing of any battle because you can swoop down with the wind behind you, discharge your cannons and engage the enemy fleet. It's much harder if you're downwind, you have to tack, do your zigzags up towards your enemy your opponent so the English spent all day on the 30th of July tacking around trying to get behind the Spanish fleet this means technically placing the Spanish fleet between them and the English coast which is on the face of it

perhaps slightly alarming but Drake and Howard both lead their squadrons around behind the Armada so that at the morning of the 31st of July 1588 the Spanish catch their first sight really of the English fleet to their astonishment not in front of them between them and the coast but behind them upwind of them and it was the first indication that the English fleet was being led by men who knew their business and they were sailing in ships not not all of them, but many of them built to the latest design. Ships which it was assumed would not fight an enemy as they had done in the Battle of Lepanto, the naval battle stretching all the way back to the ancient world by just crashing into an enemy and fighting it out with cold steel on the quarterdeck.

No, ships had been designed with cannon in mind to act as floating gun platforms, to stand off an enemy and batter them into submission. This is something you can go and see at the Mary Rose Museum. If you go down to Portsmouth, the Mary Rose began its life as a towering ship of war, one designed to go alongside an enemy ship to allow archers and men operating primitive gunpowder weapons to shoot down, to fire down on an enemy side by side, and then fight it out to capture an enemy ship. But as the Mary Rose goes through its life, it goes through various refits, and you see gun ports being put in the sides, this new technology of cannon being harnessed. So bigger and bigger guns being

put in the side, which means opening up the side of the hull, creating swinging gun ports, which ultimately would prove to be the doom of the Mary Rose as these gun ports were left open. A freak gust of wind blew it over and caused water to come churning through those gun ports and led to its capsize. But you can see in the Mary Rose, you can see in the fabric of that ship, how the technology is changing so rapidly through the 16th century. By and large, the Spanish Armada was composed of ships that expected to fight in that old-fashioned way, to get to grips literally with the enemy. And many of the English ships were of a newer, sleeker design, not meant to travel huge distances,

take expeditionary forces across the Mediterranean or across to Spanish America, but designed for coastal defence, to whip out fast fire cannonballs at the enemy and then dip back into port to resupply. There were two very different concepts at work here. And the Spanish were about to discover that their giant fleet composed these towering galleons were no match tactically for the smaller, speedier English ships that packed a much bigger punch. The interesting thing is Dan Snow's history. I'm talking about the Spanish Armada.

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. On that morning, the 31st of July, those English ships would now go into action against the Spanish. One English witness was astonished by the size of the Armada. He said, beneath the weight of it, the sea seemed to groan.

In terms of tunneling ships, probably the lightest fleet ever to sail in European waters. But remember, many of those ships were supply ships. They were transports. They were carrying tents, ammunition, a siege train, ready-made defensive barricades, things that were needed for the invasion of England. They were protected in the centre of this giant mass of ships. It looked a little bit like a big crescent, a sort of crescent moon. The slower moving transports in the middle, the warships on either side, the escorts on either

side. These escort ships with their towering stern castles and forecastles bristling with soldiers ready with their muskets, their ammunition, their swords sharpened, ready to take on the enemy if they came too close and tried to board. But of course, remember, that was not the English plan. Howard, Drake and others were planning on using cannon, heavy guns, not steel, to subdue the Spanish. Howard sent forward the 80-tonne bark small ship called Disdain to perform an act of some incongruous etiquette at this point. Disdain sailed to within shouting distance of the Spanish ships and fired one cannonball straight into their midst. England was now at war with Spain. Hostilities could commence. Howard on board Art Royal led his squadron straight at the southern

end of this crescent. Drake on board Revenge headed for the north. Although of course it's open to debate and discussion, this is pretty much the first example of this tactic being used in war at sea. A fleet following in line of stunts of one after the other, heading towards an enemy fleet, firing its broad-sized cannon, cannon mounted along the sides of the ships that fire at 90 degrees to the axis of the ship sailing, and then turning away to reload before coming in for another go. This was a form of warfare that would be refined and perfected right up through the next centuries, up until the Battle of Trafalgar, of course, but arguably right up until the Battle of Jutland, big gun battleships firing in line astern. But this was

one of its first incarnations. The English couldn't risk getting too close to the Spanish ship because the Spanish ships were bristling with those soldiers. It would overwhelm any Englishman that managed to grapple. So, led by Drake and Howard, the English squadrons, using their superior sailing skills, sailed up, discharged their cannons, and whizzed around to reload and plan another pass. The Spanish, to their discomfort, found themselves under almost constant bombardment. And interestingly, one of Spain's more experienced commanders I mentioned before, Raquel de, he knew this would happen. So he tried to precipitate the kind of grappling action, close quarters fight that he and his Spanish compatriots wanted.

He let his ship fall behind slightly, offering himself up as a kind of tempting prize to the English. But infuriating to the old Spanish commander, people like Drake and Frobisher didn't take the bait. They kept sending their ships two, three, four hundred meters off, firing their broadsides into the San Juan Raquel de's ship, doing enormous damage and not letting him get close enough to deploy his 600 troops that was watching helplessly as their ship was battered to pieces. Medina Estonia was eventually forced to bring a squadron of battleships, tack back and go and get Raquel de and bring him back into the 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 was a clash of two very different kinds of doctrines, but there was also a problem for the English. While they could inflict very annoying damage on the Spanish fleet, they couldn't break up the fleet. They couldn't sink significant numbers of those ships. They couldn't capture them by long-range artillery fire alone. The English ships simply didn't have the weight of cannon. For example, the HMS Victory would have 300 years later. The weight of cannon allowed British ships at the Battle of Quiberon Bay, for example, in 1759 to blast such powerful broadsides into their French opponents that they could disable or even

sink French ships with a broadside or two. So whilst this long-range fire, these jabs coming in from the English, were frustrating, they didn't represent yet an existential threat to the Spanish fleet. And so the Spanish sailed onwards, bruised by the English, but making their way up the English coast towards the Low Countries. One ship, the Rosario, was damaged in a collision with another Spanish ship in the chaos of battle. Other ships were unable to take under tow and it was left to fend for itself. Another Spanish ship blew up. We don't quite know why. The story goes that it could be a 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. But we don't know if that's true.

So two Spanish ships have become detached. There's an interesting story about the Rosario that does reflect quite nicely on Drake's personality. That night, he was meant to be leading the English fleet with a lantern on his top mast. He saw the Rosario had been abandoned he extinguished the lantern went off a little privateering little piratical action for himself he went alongside the Rosario in the dead of night he shouted that he was Drake and the Rosario immediately surrendered there's a great line which I read somewhere once which I can never find out whether it's true he sailed up the Rosario and just shouted I am Drake and my matches are lit. And the Spanish ship surrendered immediately. Don't believe me on that because I cannot tell

if it's true. However, they did immediately surrender to Drake, whatever was said as he came up alongside. On board the ship were 55,000 gold ducats, part of the treasure that any expedition had to carry with them to pay the men and pay for supplies and everything else. Mysteriously, only about half of that treasure ended up in Queen Elizabeth's coffers. The rest of it strangely went missing so it was a good night for Sir Francis Drake but it wasn't a great night for the English fleet because lacking their guidance Sir Francis Drake 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 1st of August frantically regrouping as the Spanish fleet moved sedately but unstoppably across Lyme Bay. On the 2nd of August there was a

slight 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. There's one of the most remarkable tidal races in the world that rips around the bottom of Portland Bill. I've been there in fairly calm conditions and yet the waves that can be three four meters high that's before any wind is factored into at all and in this occasion it seems like local knowledge was an advantage to the English. There were fierce gun battles described by some historians as the fiercest naval gun battles that have ever occurred to that point in history but still no knockout blows administered by either side. By the evening the the San Martin, the Duke of Medina-Sydonia's

flagship, had been hit by 500 rounds. The Spanish were learning a better lesson. The English were naval gunnery experts, and the Spanish simply had no mechanism to fire back anything like the frequency of the English. It was estimated that for every three shots the English fired, only one Spanish shot was fired. The crews weren't trained. There was just no doctrine of rapid broadside firing in the Spanish fleet. But still, the Spanish Armada was intact and continued. On the 3rd of August, they reached the Isle of Wight. Now there's a mystery here. Was the Duke of Medina Estonia sufficiently chastened by his experiences in the previous few days to try and grab a base to operate. Also, of course, he had this fundamental problem.

He had not heard anything from the Duke of Parma. There was 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 harbours between the Isle of Wight and the Straits of Dover. So it seemed like, possibly, it's a bit unclear, Medina Stonia could have decided, like the French in the 1540s, to try and seize the Isle of Wight and use it as a bit unclear. Medina Estonia could have decided, like the French in the 1540s, to try and seize the Isle of Wight and use it as a base of operations, or at least wait until they heard

from Parma in the Low Countries. Howard was very aware of this possibility, and he organised the English fleet to pursue a very simple aim, which was to keep the Spanish out of the Solent, keep the Spanish out from behind the Isle of Wight. The obvious men to put in charge of four squadrons was himself, Hawkins, Frobisher, and Drake, and they would act independently, but with this simple strategic goal in mind. Drake almost captured another ship that morning, the Grand Griffon. Please excuse my Spanish pronunciation there. But the Grand Griffon was a bit of a laggard. It was behind the Spanish fleet. Drake sailed up. We hear that its decks were rammed with soldiers ready to get to grips with Drake, but Drake stood off and fired a broadside at close range down the length of the ship. He raked the ship, one broadside, then the other. The Spanish ship suffered a hundred casualties in the space of a few seconds, but it

was successfully taken to the toe and brought back into the heart of the Spanish fleet. Frobisher, meanwhile, was trying to block the entrance to Isle of Wight. It looked like the squadron of Spanish ships was trying to get into that calm water behind the Isle of Wight, but they were summoned back by Medina Sidonia because on his southern flank there was a powerful attack being made by Drake. So he was kind of distracting the Spanish, hoping that wind would just 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 take his attention away from the north, where he may have been trying to get into the Solent and go and counter-attack Drake in the south. One Spanish officer wrote,

we who were there were cornered so that if the Jew could not come about with his flagship, we should have come out vanquished that day. The trouble is as they're doing this they're on a kind of moving sidewalk if you like. The wind is just pushing them slowly slowly slowly west to east and as they pass the Isle of Wight they're going to be unable to sail upwind into the Solent. So every minute that Drake can keep the fleet's attention out at sea, stop them from turning into the Solent, is an opportunity missed for those Spanish to sail in there and find a safe anchorage. And Drake's plan, Howard's plan, was a success. As the Spanish drifted ever further west,

they came across a giant sandbank known as the Aures. A sharp-eyed Spanish lookout saw this patch of shallow water, saw this sandbank stretches way out into the sea at this point, and the Spanish fleet was forced to alter course to the southeast to avoid hitting the shallows. That meant that it had no realistic alternative but to keep going, to head off with the wind on its backs to the low countries. The die was cast. Medina suddenly had saved his fleet from English attack, saved his fleet from the shallows, but he was now heading towards low countries with absolutely no communication with army whether they'd be ready

for him at all. The English regarded this as a big success. Again tantalisingly we just don't know enough about the Spanish plans that day but the English certainly regarded it a huge success. Howard knighted Frobisher and Hawkins on the spot and both fleets were now just driven in a gentle breeze towards Dover. Howard needed to conserve his shot, his cannonballs, his gunpowder, and the Spanish used fairly benign weather to patch up their ships to replace rigging and stitch patches over holes in their sails. The Armada had been bruised but was not destroyed and the threat of invasion was still very real. On the 6th of August, the Spanish Armada dropped anchor in the wide bay off the French port of Calais. When the message arrived at the Duke of Parma's headquarters, just a few miles away,

he was pretty surprised. The last message he'd received from the Spanish Armada was one sent when they were in Coruña in northern Spain weeks before, saying that they intended to set sail. Now, here they were off the coast of northern france very near his army in the low countries the problem is his army was spread out as armies were in those days you had to take men to the food not the other way around so armies would be spread out for billeting and logistical reasons so it would take days to gather his men together and then he still had this problem the problem that miracle was supposed to solve he had no way of getting his troops out to Spanish ships. Philip of Spain had airily said, they will meet you in the channel. He didn't have the ships. He did not have the barges and the

ships to take his men out into the channel via canals and rivers, out into the narrows, through the blockading squadrons of Dutch rebels. He didn't have a way of doing it. It was tantalizing for the Spanish because they had managed to get this giant fleet to within a few days' march of their incredibly impressive veteran army. But the devil was in the detail, folks. There was no way of them actually joining up. The anchorage off Calais is not very well protected. It's very, very vulnerable to strong southwesterly gales.

So Medina Estonia could not keep the armada anchored there for more than a few days. Medina Estonia, even though they didn't know the sea that well, knew this. He'd written to Palmer a few days before, unless we can find a harbour, we will perish without doubt. However, the English were also deeply concerned. The Spanish Armada and the Duke of Palmer's army were too close for comfort. And that's why they decided to take action that night.

They did not want to take the risk that the Duke of Parma would manage to embark his fleet on the Armada, even if it did take a week or two. They needed to act now to break up the Armada and sever that link between the land and the sea forces. At midnight that night, at the 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 realised with horror that the English had deployed fire ships. They'd taken eight older ships, armed merchantmen of no great value. They'd stacked them high with spare supplies, with old sails and rope covered in tar and pitch,

a bit of gunpowder, and they turned them into kind of floating bombs. They sailed them in on the breeze and the tide towards Calais and towards the Spanish fleet. Now, sailors in wooden ships are terrified of fire for a simple reason. Everything on those ships, every single thing, is very, very combustible.

Fire could destroy ships more certainly in a storm, more certainly in cannonballs, more certainly than enemy boarding party. It was devastating. Few soldiers or sailors could swim. When your ship caught fire, it was a death sentence. You had to choose between the icy water or the terrible flames. Medina Estonia had anticipated the use of English fire ships. A small flotilla of Spanish open boats, rowing boats, headed out and managed to grapple two of the ships and towed them out of the way where they burned down harmlessly. But the rest of the ships kept coming on. The crews of the Spanish Armada, which had been anchored in

a neat, tight defensive huddle, cut their anchor cables, jettisoned their anchors, and did what they could to escape from the oncoming fire ships. The southwesterly wind blew many of them beyond Calais right up towards the port of Gravelines just on the border of what is now France and Belgium. 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. The Armada was now spread out. Ships in ones and twos, little clusters of ships, anchored desperately all along what is now the French and Belgian coast. And at dawn, the English gleefully attacked. They saw their opportunity. With trumpets blaring, the English fleet, some royal galleons,

others heavily armed merchant ships, private men of war, they closed with the Spanish ships. The Spanish desperately fired signal cannon to order their fleet to reassemble but it was to no avail in the battle that followed the battle of gravelly and the english probably could have done more damage if they had fought with the kind of discipline we expect of later naval actions it was a bit of a free-for-all there was private gain in many of the men's minds including howard the commander he saw a massive spanisheass, which is a sailing ship, also oar-powered, slaves at the oars. It was now limping into Calais, hoping the neutral French would give it a safe haven.

Howard spotted this juicy prize, and rather than aiming for Medina Estonia's flagship or some of the more impressive warships among the Spanish, he headed for that galleass. He wanted to capture it and exploit whatever wealth was on board. Many of Howard's squadron followed, so he ended up with a huge number of English ships just attacking this one Spanish galleass. They drove it ashore and they looted the wreck of this Spanish galleass before the neutral French, upset this was happening in their shallows, opened fire and drove them back to their ships. One of the Armada's greatest ships had been destroyed, yes, but it was at the cost of a huge amount of time and attention from many of the

best English ships. Drake had led other ships straight at the Spanish fleet. His revenge passed the Duke of Medina Estonia's San Martin at very short range, close enough if they wanted to for the two men to have shouted at each other. The revenge's stern cabin was shot through with some of the Spanish ship's cannonballs. Drake performed his now trademark tactic of firing one broadside into her, then another, damaging Medina Stonia's flagship terribly. And critically, the ships that followed Drake into action did the same. So there was a near constant battering of some of the finest Spanish ships. On the Spanish flagship, it was hellish. Rigging crashed down, there was a hole below the waterline. She was hit something like 200 times. It was said her decks were awash with blood. I always think, imagine the Spanish soldiers at their action stations waiting to grapple,

do as they'd been trained to do, expecting to board the enemy's ship, unable to bring their weapons to bear, their energy to bear, but have no impact on the outcome of this naval battle. It must have been incredibly frustrating. We do hear about the Spanish roaring at the English, calling them Lutheran hens, challenging them to come and fight like men with cold steel, rather than stand off and batter them in this rather unsporting way. The English ships were able to get closer. Isolated Spanish were picked off and surrounded by a swarm of English ships. The San Mateo and the San Felipe both suffered particularly badly. the san mateo and the san felipe both suffered particularly badly the san felipe had holes torn its hull her rudder smashed her foremast fell 200 men killed on her decks the san mateo was said to

be so riddled with shot she was like a sieve and sailors on board got a taste of this new era of warfare at sea no less terrifying no doubt than a swarm of men fighting on these floating platforms hand to hand, but different. Now cannonballs smashing through hulls, sending shards of razor sharp wood cartwheeling through the air, splintering, scything into men, causing terrible, terrible injuries and death. The Spanish gunnery, by contrast, was very ineffective. As I say, they hadn't trained for this. And although spanish cannonball managed to smash into the earl of northumberland ship and grazed his feet knocking down two men in general the spanish were unable to inflict heavy damage on the english ships many of their cannon for example didn't have the special carriages that we associate with naval

guns you think about hms victory for example there's four small wheels on them the spanish were using the cannon you'd expect to use on land, two big wheels, making them far more unwieldy, much more difficult to manoeuvre and manhandle in the confined lower decks of a ship. By the afternoon, many Spanish ships were in a terrible condition. The San Felipe and the San Mateo, though I mentioned, were floating wrecks.

Their commanders were helpless as they both beached themselves, hit the sandbanks of the dutch coast and were set upon by jubilant dutch rebels the maria juan sank outright and all in all i think this battle disproves the traditional telling of the armada story which actually the weather not the english ships defeated the spanish armada this was a comprehensive defeat the spanish suffered at sea their strategic purpose was completely interrupted, their ships were terribly damaged, and some were captured or grounded. And in fact, this is the naughty bit everyone, the weather in fact saved the Spanish Armada at this point. At four o'clock

in the afternoon, as many of the Spanish ships were sort of drifting helplessly, unable to steer, their crews battered, damaged, command and control broken down. A squall blew up from the northwest, pushing the Spanish onto one of the most treacherous stretches of coastline in the entire world, the shallows of the Dutch coast, with its rocks and sandbars. Just an impossible place to sail, even today. Those Flemish sandbanks came ever closer. The colour of the water changed, the depth sounding showed that it was first eight fathoms, seven fathoms. The biggest ships needed five fathoms of water to sail. It seemed as disastrous many minutes away. With the English to seaward, the Dutch rebels and their light, shallow craft towards the land, the Spanish looked like they were about to suffer a devastating, devastating

defeat. And various officers came up to the Duke of Medina and begged him to take the papal banner into a small fast boat and make for a safe haven in Flanders. He refused, he wanted to die like a Christian soldier, he said. He shouted to one of his squadron commanders, we're 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 suddenly, quite suddenly, or perhaps it's that miracle they were 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. Medina Sidonia wrote, and tell this next time someone talks about the weather in

the Armada, Medina Sidonia 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. They'd managed to separate it from the Duke of Parma's army when it had been anchored in Calais. They were only a matter of 30 or so miles apart. Now, the Spanish Armada was drifting off into the North Sea. The ships were badly damaged. There seemed little chance the Spanish Armada would ever be able to turn around, fight its way back to the Low Countries. But it was still in existence and therefore still a threat. And to make matters worse, the English had used up nearly

all their cannonballs and gunpowder in the Battle of Graveline. As for the Spanish though, they faced a very dire situation. Their only realistic way home now was up through the North Sea, around the top of Scotland and Ireland, back out into the Bay of Biscay and down to Spain. It was a brutal journey at the best of times, but to cruise decimated by battle, to ships that were very badly damaged, it was a journey that many would be unable to make. It was the only decision, however, open to the Spanish, and they set off on a long, brutal journey. The English fleet shattered them as far as the Scottish border, at which point they turned around and headed back to England. It's worth remembering at this point by the way that Elizabeth I's very celebrated speech at Tilbury in which

she said 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 and I myself will take up arms. I myself will be your general. It's worth remembering that 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 Graveline when she said those words. So like all the best politicians and generals, she embraced hyperbole and spin when it suited her. Meanwhile, the Spanish endured a journey of hell back home. Ship after ship was smashed on exposed beaches in Scotland and on the north coast of Ireland, Donegal, Antrim.

They ran low on water and irreparable damage. They stopped to take survivors of other ships, so ships became overcrowded. I've dived on the ruins of the great Galleas, the Girona, which is very near the Giant's Causeway, and several ships companies by that stage had been amalgamated. And that poor ship struck the coast of Antrim in a gale and were were very, very few survivors. Those that were were hunted down by the English authorities in Ireland and killed. Deleva, one of Philip's favourites, the aristocratic admiral that I mentioned, was one of the many killed on that coast. The stories of that journey home are almost too awful to comprehend. Medina Estonia made it back. He made it back with a group of ships

and arrived in Santander, northern Spain on the 21st of September, 44 days after the defeat at Graveline. Over the next few weeks, other ships struggled back in. The crews hobbled, totally enfeebled by scurvy, influenza, typhus, malnutrition. Medina Estonia himself almost died of dysentery. Raquelve, his second-in-commando I've mentioned, died days after arriving in Spain. People said at the time he died of shame. He was ashamed to face his family or friends. Of the 120 ships that set sail, at least 45 and perhaps 10,000-11,000 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 and there will be considerable ups and downs after that anyone knows the history of the rest of the 16th century let alone the 17th century will know that britannia did not rule the waves, not for another 150 years at least, but it has perhaps rightly been seen as a starting point, as a almost mythological beginning of a rise to maritime greatness by the English and then the British navy. And certainly many of the strengths that Drake, Howard, Hawkins were able to call upon were strengths that were built upon and largely embedded into a culture of excellence by the

navies that followed. Men like Blake in the 17th century and the great commanders of the 18th century were able to enlarge upon, seek inspiration from that battle against the Spanish Armada. It was also a great moment of national triumph, the salvation from the world's great superpower. That indefinable thing, national confidence, received a from the world's great superpower, that indefinable thing, national confidence, received a great boost. It mattered. The sad truth is there was a more immediate aftermath of the Armada, one that was altogether less poetic, and that is that Elizabeth let her victorious sailors rot at their moorings, almost literally. They were left to die as the country celebrated its victory. Typhus tore through the fleet, which is what happened whenever large fleets, large crews of men got together with inadequate sanitation and hygiene,

no knowledge of disease and microbes. Thousands were killed. Food and fresh water were not delivered to the ships in harbour. England, which had exerted itself to the limit to find the resources to defeat the Spanish Armada, did not find the resources to feed and look after its victorious sailors. Those who were demobilized were given no food, no money, and the streets of Dover, of Rochester, of Harwich were lined with emaciated sailors too weak to go home. Howard was devastated to his credit and he pawned his family's silver in an attempt to provide food and shelter for his men. It's thought the English lost only around 100 men fighting the Armada but they could have lost up to 8,000 men or 50% of

their strength in the weeks and months that followed. It was a shameful end to an English victory. But that was forgotten as myths were made and there was no stronger founding myth of Britain's navy and its empire than the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588. I hope you've enjoyed this podcast. This weekend we've got a special code for History Hit TV. Become a subscriber, check it all out. You'll get some naval history on there. Just use the code Armada and you get 50% off your first three months. What a sweet deal. So use the code Armada. Thanks for listening to the podcast. My name's Dan, and my matches are lit. I feel we have the history on our shoulders.

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