The Spanish Armada and Antwerp - Did Zeeland doom the Armada before it even sailed?

foreign [Music] sponsored by Squarespace so today I'm going to show you a little bit more detail about how you can manipulate the images in your gallery so just quickly speed running through adding a new page on early British destroyers select a gallery that is at least initially to your preference get rid of those upload some pictures you can see here some early British destroy pictures but you can see they're currently all in the columns in the center of the page I'm going to set it to full bleed so it's full width and then you've got various aspect ratios now a lot of these photographs are very long and thin so by setting the aspect ratio to 16 to 9 you get a better view of most of the ships but as you can see some of them are still a little bit cut off you can choose an even wider view now that does help but I personally think it cuts off the top and bottom some other images so I'm going to go with 16 by nine and of course as you see we can have two columns one column three columns 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channel you already know who I am I am of course Drac boardrik NFL but I have with me today I guess so hello guest hello uh thank you very much for having me on my name is Paul Leyland um I'm mostly a strategy consultant but I occasionally Moonlight as a historian and I'm here to talk about how the Spanish Armada Was Defeated on land three years before it sailed excellent and well if that hasn't got you interested well what are you doing watching the channel anyway so as you might guess from uh what's behind us we are in a museum we are in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich specifically in Queen's house in the Armada room so if you do get the chance obviously please do come and visit because these are historic paintings a lot of the images you might be seeing coming up in the video will be digital copies of some of the paintings that are here in their original form so you probably at this point all seen the painting of the battle of gravelines or grabbling or however it's pronounced in French really high resolution photos around but the original is literally right behind us and has so much more detail than any digital picture will ever give you so definitely come and visit the national Maritime Museum and give them your support now now that we know that it's about the Armada we're in front of well one of three copies of the Armada painting I guess a little bit of background to what we're going to be talking about which is to do with the Netherlands so why is the Armada coming to England what what's this got to do with the Netherlands why are the Dutch fighting the Spanish and what's that got to do with at the time of the English sure so this is a really convoluted and complicated story which I'll try to distill into a few minutes so initially the English plan was not to stop the Spanish it was to stop the French the uh Queen Elizabeth escalated the Dutch Revolt by helping Philip II of Spain essentially what happened in 1566 there was widespread revolts in the Netherlands Philip II sent his favorite General Duke of Alva who was a viciously effective commander and he'd largely driven the Revolt to the coasts which the Netherlands being full of polar are quite defensible and a number of the rebels effectively became politically motivated Pirates they were given letters of Mark by William of Orange and therefore they sought diplomatic sanctuary in the ports of England which Philip II found very frustrating and by in February 1572 his his uh temper was uh was finally frayed and a very strong diplomatic note was sent to the English government that said you're going to have to do something about this these are pirates and they are um attacking attacking Spanish possessions in the Netherlands um so Elizabeth did what she felt was right and banished them from English ports so it was absolutely to maintain a good relations with the with the Spanish and quite by coincidence the Duke of Albert sent um The Garrison of Brill which is a Dutch Port on the shell test jury to put down another bit of a Revolt in in Utrecht and so the sea Beggars were able to occupy Brill in March and then things happened really quickly so there were a number of uh strongly motivated Calvinists in England who volunteered to go and help the Dutch at this point because the island of valkyrin which becomes key to this story also revolted and the huguenots who were French Calvinists um joined in and became a very large Force helping the sea Beggars and suddenly from being a failed Rebellion that was largely driven into the sea there was a chance for the Dutch to fight for their freedom again and Belgium as well so there was then a really big problem because the French were considering sending an army of six thousand men to support the rebels as well and so suddenly in June uh 1572 it looked as though the French may take over the Netherlands and so a memorial was produced a memo a government memo was produced and I'll I'll read the key sentence because it's quite punching um if the French proceed to seek the maritime coasts of the low countries it were good that the Duke of araba were informed secretly of the Queen's disposition to assist the king his master by all honorable means I'm not sure they meant that in the defense of his inheritance so this is key to the entire Armada narrative and and particularly up to 1585 English policy never changed although the strategy went all over the place English policy was to continue an interminable war in the Netherlands to ensure that nobody was in charge to ensure that nobody was going to be able to generate a sufficient Maritime Force to threaten England from the Shelt the only group of people that looked like they might be able to do that in the 50s early 1570s was the French and so British English policy was to keep France out of the Netherlands and so start using the base on Valkyrie as a means of doing that but also cooperate with the Spanish of needs be now then tragically stop struck for France in September 1572 the volume Day Massacre occurred and in the ensuing civil war and violence around 10 000 huguenots came were killed so very suddenly England's core problem of lots of Huguenot soldiers on Valkyrie which was strategically important to uh to England was was solved because they all went home to defend their families and France was unable to send a royal Army into the Netherlands because it was fighting a civil war so suddenly by a combination of the the Judgment of saying we need to be able to do something to keep the the Netherlands confused and the good luck of France being unable to do anything meant that a volunteer English army was in control of valkyr and by the end of 1572 other than the Fortress of Middleburg the capital which which fell in 1574. so a comedy Bearer if you will LED England to control valkyrim early on in the Dutch Revolt right okay so that explains what everyone's doing up to this point so the Spanish aren't particularly happy with the English the French aren't particularly happy with the English and I was particularly happy with the English but that's how the English like it as you mentioned it's almost it's very Yes Prime Minister isn't it yes you side with whoever's the losing side against the strong side and then when they become The Winning Side you side with the loser just to keep everyone on their toes so we then come to the point of Antwerp so what happens with Antwerp so Antwerp had always been a very important port it's uh by the mid 16th century it was the largest port in the world and a couple of things had had driven that the first was that it was that it had become the main Hub of the English world trade but just as importantly for the for the Spanish Armada story because I'm sure most of your your listeners know it was a Spanish Portuguese Fleet and the Portuguese fleet was the key yeah um it from the from the beginning of the 16th century Antwerp was the main Hub of the Portuguese spice trade because it was a big deep water port and suddenly you had big deep water ocean-going vessels rather than just Coastal traffic and the wool trade that needed to to come into a large port in the Netherlands so so Antwerp was the financial Hub of Northern Europe it was a massive Port that was handling roughly two and a half thousand ships a week I mean it's a phenomenally High figure there's a reason why even now Antwerp is the second largest port in in Europe Rotterdam largest that's next door back at this time Rotterdam was a tiny tiny village so by about 1550 Antwerp had a population of around 100 000 people so it's about as big as London he had a seafaring population of around 15 000 people so it didn't take any imagination in England to realize that Antwerp was where any powerful force coming to invade England was going to come from but Antwerp has an Achilles heel and that is that it's 30 odd miles down the shell Estuary and in order to get to Antelope you have to sail right past valkyr and Ireland so if you hold valkyrum you block Antwerp so Antwerp has the a an extraordinary capacity to cause trouble for England but also England has the ability to block up and again if your listeners are familiar with it Napoleonic Wars the 1809 valkyrin exhibition was was designed to do that but it failed miserably and interestingly the reason why failed was because of the lack of provisions and even in September 1572 if you mind if I read again uh Lord Burley the head of the government was in was in was informed of this um so uh so Humphrey Gilbert he was one of the main volunteer commanders um wrote a Majesty may have um at this present uh the islands of valkyrim um zikaze and South beverland which are all of great wealth and lie together they have out of them 80 sale of Men of War um such as they be they are not very well visualed which is always the problem with valkyrin as you as you probably know but if they had told them which is a nearby Hinterland then these three islands are able to Vittle 20 000 men continually so by September 1572 Not only was there a policy in place to deal with a great power taking over the maritime capacity of the Netherlands there was also a strategic plan to put troops there will be it was a bit flaky because they were volunteers and an operational understanding that those troops could only be there if they had Provisions from the mainland so lots of things fell into place that were not there in 1809 yeah and this so the strategy of having something whether it be an island or something else that dominates what would otherwise be a critical Seaway is absolutely key throughout Maritime history I mean Gibraltar is an obvious one although it's not an island but it guards The Straits the entrance to the Mediterranean so if you control that you control basically anything that comes to and from hence why Britain took it from the Spanish and never gave it back um heliger land is another one the British took it off of at ostensibly at the time the Denmark in the Napoleonic Wars and it ended about back in German control in 1890 but only because the newly formed German Empire looked took one look at heligalander when it's sitting right outside the Keel canal and not too far from wilhelms Harvard if we have a foreign power there our Naval dreams are basically Dead on Arrival so they traded Zanzibar of all places for it um and even when the Royal Navy was mostly based in the Thames again there's no real major Island sitting in the Thames Estuary but we do have Chatham and the Medway which is obviously where they're on maybe then based itself mostly to good effect although the Dutch gave us a few bruises on that one a little bit after the Armada um so yeah it's it's vitally important to always remember that just because you control the port and of course the Spanish do occupy Antwerp um if you can't get out because someone dominates the sea passages there it's effectively useless yeah it's a big Bill and there's a there's a there's a wonderful direct lineage to telegram as well because um the guy who gave up helical land was a little Salisbury who was a direct descendant of little Burley and interestingly little Burley also didn't have a full and complete understanding of the maritime strategy it was Francis waltzingham who largely did but it's quite interesting that that Lord Salisbury effectively handed the North Sea to Germany and started the end of the British Empire because of it hmm so one of the key things to remember at this point is that as we talked about earlier the French were for a very long time before thought as the main threat to invading England but one of the critical issues is that although France is very close to England geographically all of the major French ports at the time that could be used lie somewhere adjacent to what you might call roughly the middle part of the English South Coast or in the case of breast it's on the Atlantic coast but it's miles away relative to the the near reports what this means is that if you have any kind of wind that's going to drive the French Fleet to the English Shore and bearing in mind that obviously we're talking about the age of sale then an English Fleet based somewhere along the channel or maybe on the Medway can intercept it so if the wind's coming from let's say the East you can get Ships coming from the Medway maybe Ships coming from Dover if the wind's coming from the West you can get Ships coming from Plymouth and they're coming maybe from Portsmouth if they're an invasion Place coming from Calais so there's always a way to defend if there's a really really strong Breeze coming straight from the south you have a few more problems but that also limits the directions that the French can come so you know where to defend the problem with Antwerp is that Antwerp is right to the east of England at the time because this is before the active Union if the wind then comes in from the East I drive in West down the channel That means that every single English ship whether they be in the Medway Plymouth Dover Portsmouth or wherever is either pinned in port or can sail west The Invasion Fleet that's coming from the East can also sail west but obviously they will come in where the English league cannot physically get to which makes the coast effectively undefended by ships which is a major problem if you're an Islander your main defense is a Navy because let's face it the English army at the time is not a professional Army it's not a standing army and compared to the major land armies of Europe it's not particularly large either so we've got this volunteer force of English soldiers happily sitting basically at the mouth of the Shelt what turns this from a bunch of volunteers who are over there mainly because it's kind of in some ways an extension of the 30 Years War and all the religious complex in Europe over to British government policy of we are keeping this locked down sure so there's there's an awful lot of twists and turns here um largely relating to Queen Elizabeth dangling the carrot of marriage to uh Francois Duke donju who was second in line to the throne brother of army III and um again there's another comedy of errors that we don't need to go into but essentially in the summer of 1584 there is a there is a huge crisis so the Duke donzu dies and because he's dead the heir to the throne of France is he becomes the first bourbon king of uh of France but right now he's a Protestant so there's a civil war yes now that means that the French are not going to intervene to help this to help the Dutch and now the English security problem is flipped because whereas before it was this the French who were going to be the main threat the Duke Palmer has proved to be a very effective commander and he's dominating in the low countries and crucially in 50 1980 to 1583 Spain takes on Portugal which gives Spain a deep sea Fleet and a much better Port Atlantic Port in Lisbon so suddenly Spain not France is the really scary power so France is taken out of the picture and critically also this is exactly the same time Antwerp is besieged now Antwerp has got about 80 000 people in it citizens militias back then were like conscript armies so antwer could put about 8 000 men into its defense it was an extraordinarily uh well-defended City because it had been sacked previously and initially there was a hope that Antwerp might hold and it did hold for a year but it became increasingly clear that Palmer had the ability to take it he even built a 700 meter Bridge across the Shelf to have the benefit of holding both sides that he put guns on to prevent supplies getting through and Antwerp was literally starving to death by the time the siege ended the population had halved some of them had escaped but a lot of them had died so in October 15 84. um Elizabeth was forced to bite the bullet and do what she absolutely didn't want to do and call Parliament and say we got effectively a war on our hands because she needed taxes only way to fund a a non-volunteer English military commitment was to was to raise taxes which is exactly what happened and immediately there was an idea Francis Walsingham that looks like first materialized in in July 1578 was to take three towns they're known as the cautionary towns and Francis Walsingham rather cleverly persuaded Elizabeth that if we hold these towns the Dutch won't be naughty and won't fail to repay their debts we'll we'll have something that they need which was kind of true they they bought them back from James the first but what he really meant and you could tell this from his correspondence Whittle Burley was if they hold Brill which um is the the northern deep sea port that you could potentially launch an invasion from and also it's sufficiently far away from the main Belgium action that you can supply of Alcorn so it's it's offensive defensive and listening uh flushing which is the main deep sea port that you would launch an invasion from on um if you if you uh if you couldn't use valkyrin which is what Palmer wanted to do and it was also the place where they would invade if you sent the Armada to take valkyr and say you need to hold listen and then critically fought ramekins which was the first major Coastal Seafort in Europe designed for river Rhine esterion sea control so um there was an agreement that 6 000 men would be would be paid for by Parliament and stationed there the the citizens of Zealand they've been trying to get Queen Elizabeth to become their Queen for quite a while they were pretty discomforted the idea that Britain was England was going to take control without sovereignty without representation but by July 1585 it was fairly obvious that Antwerp was going to fall and that put the citizens of Zealand and England into a problem because Flanders pretty much a separate country almost would have wanted Zealand to lose because if Zealand is continuing to fight but Antwerp is part of the effectively the burgundy and Spanish Empire then Antwerp can't trade and this is why the it was vital that English troops took valkyrim formally because otherwise it was very likely that there will be a stitch up deal to allow trade to happen again because this is what was making the low countries so wealthy and one of the things that is really remarkable from what happens afterwards is that the Netherlands becomes really really rich and Belgium becomes relatively poor and that's entirely because of the block up of of antwer because it's still controlled by the Dutch so the English agree the Treaty of non-such and by August 1585 there are 4 000 troops officially English stationed on valkyrin ensuring that it can't be taken by sea and it can't be taken by land so the fall of Antwerp the collapse of France into Civil War and the knowledge that there is a real risk that the Dutch will be persuaded to give up valkyrin if there's only volunteers on it to to make money again all coalesced to force a rapid response yeah okay and then of course we get the Armada comes along a few years later and as you mentioned earlier it's very important to know that although it's the Spanish Armada because it's launched on the orders of Philip of Spain it is made up of a lot of different ships from a lot of different places Spain has taken over so the majority of its fighting power comes from the Portuguese and people might be surprising well hang on Spanish galleons we've all heard of those well yes but a lot of the Spanish galleons you've heard of our ex Portuguese galleons but also even before the Spanish took over Portugal yes they did have a lot of galleons and other ships cruising around in the Atlantic but a large majority of them were concerned mostly with maintaining the ongoing pillaging of South and Central America the majority of Spanish fighting power during a lot of the Peregrine spanning was the preeminent power was concentrated in the Mediterranean to fight the Ottomans and a lot of that looked very different from the fleet that would come up the English Channel as the Spanish Armada lots of galleys lots of galliases absolutely fantastic for fighting in the relatively confined and usually calm water the Mediterranean practically useless for Oceanic Warfare initially the Spanish order of battle did include lots of their galleys and then they realized this was a really terrible idea and even the number of Galley asses got cut down eventually they sent four they didn't do particularly brilliantly which most people could have told you was going to happen anyway but inevitably you get the Armada coming up in with its mostly Portuguese heavy fighting Power Spanish transports some Spanish galleons and various other ships they've managed to acquire big Borough or Steel so what could have happened if the Spanish had not just control of Antwerp but control of the shelter first so somehow ever dissuade the British from being there what the what the Spanish needed um were frigates but they didn't invent frigates until the 17th century for precisely the reason that we can go into now because what the admiralties of Holland and Zealand had were a lot of um little Little Ships shallow drafts that um if they if a great ship was was caught on its own would be would be would be taken out and that had happened quite often with the uh Portuguese spice gallies it had quite helped them quite often with Spanish reinforcements that were coming through so immediately the Spanish Armada broke up out of its defensive formation um near the coast it could be picked off by principally um Dutch ships now if the shelves were open it's a big enough River channel for the Spanish Armada to sail in defensive formations and so if valkyrun were unoccupied or occupied by Spanish troops then the Armada could get into Antwerp um Palmer's Army could be embarked and then as you mentioned With the Wind they simply have to wait for the right wind and the right wind for them is three things that doesn't happen in in France first of all it is a win that they can leave the Shelt um Wesley it is a wind that takes them to England and is a wind that prevents the English Fleet from attacking so Angela's got everything you need the other key thing about Antwerp is it's effectively on a Rhine Estuary and so everything an army could do everything that ships could need from Switzerland to the Sea can be provided so you just have to wait for the right time and as we know from the Real History of the Armada which is painting wonderfully honestly shows is that the English Fleet don't have an answer to a Spanish Portuguese Fleet information so that's the key to Antwerp that's the key to the shelter they come out in formation Nothing Stops them and critically which I'm sure we'll come on to they can invade north of the Thames which is an other if you were very south of the Thames you haven't invaded England you've invaded Kent yeah that's importantly different yeah and I think this is one of the things that's always very important to bear in mind is because when you get to the end of the historical Armada campaign when the English Fleet is sitting in the North Sea waiting to see if the Spanish going to loop back from what turns out to be Luke Brown Scotland and Ireland a lot of the English Fleet is decimated by disease which tends to happen in those days if a fleet stays out at sea too long if the Armada goes into Antwerp loads up with men as you said they've got all the supplies they could possibly want they can stay there practically indefinitely waiting for the wind to change and if the wind changes early fantastic the industry gets blown back the Armada can sail but even if they don't get a Westerly for months they can just sit there the English Fleet if it sits outside will eventually weaken and succumb to disease at which point even a moderately favorable wind is fine for them so it's a absolutely huge hugely important what if but of course thanks to the occupation of Alfred doesn't happen so what happens to Palmer's Army because obviously he can't load onto the Armada Inn and work he's got a load somewhere so where does he end up going so he prefer this 1940 without The Little Ships he um turns up to Dunkirk where his army is largely decimated by disease as well because you can't get the provisions it's the countryside and Marshall and polder um and essentially the the problem with the entire um Belgian Coast from Dunkirk up to Australian Michelle testery is that it is shallow it is full of sandbanks and the Armada just can't get close you've also got the problem with the wind that the you know the Protestant wind is the Southwest are as soon as you go through the fire ships do as soon as as soon as you sort of Pop through the cork of the channel you're up into the North Sea and you're just blown upwards and the the Spanish Armada couldn't beat back to Dunkirk and so they had no chance of looking up but the the coastal sea control of the Dutch Navy was vital here because it meant that even though there was only maybe a kilometer between the um Spanish Armada and Palmer's army they had no way on Earth seeing that kilometer except in barges and those bars would have been decimated by fly boats and small Dutch craft as well as the the the English Navy which was loitering about so Palmer could not put to see because the other critical element of the English defensive plan which was provided by the uh by the Dutch was they had almost perfect intelligence because you you can't load an army onto barges it takes about 72 hours um and you can't do it in secrets you can't you can't hide it because it's on the beach which means that all of the Dutch ships that are sitting off the coast are watching exactly what you do you know exactly what's going to happen and so even if they were lucky enough to potentially get across they would have been intercepted yeah so so Dunkirk was a is is lit is not possible because of the the Dutch Navy but even if it were possible Palmer wouldn't want to end up in Market yeah yeah right so you mentioned the you the Dutch the um you mentioned Palmer doesn't want to end up in Margate and you mentioned a bit earlier about invading Ken so what is so critical about not Landing onto the South Coast because we've seen you know Napoleon's invasion plans uh Hitler's Invasion plans not only do they have the same problem of yes you can cross the channel in small boats as long as there's absolutely nobody to oppose you um but they rely on landing on the south coast um but as you said that's probably not the best idea so why so 1066 and all that people tend to stop the story with the arrow in the eye and to be fair once you've killed the King William's got an awful lot going for him so after Hastings William marches up to um to what he thinks is London sorry and uh what what William mcconker actually does is he marches to Suffolk and he sees the tense and on the other side of the terms and so he's get across and he burns up which doesn't achieve very much and then he marches to Oxfordshire 100 miles 100 kilometers and he manages to bribe an old to keep a bridge open so he can cross the Thames so we can eventually invade London now this is a time when a lot of people in England think that William it's probably got a reasonable chance of being the legitimate King and he's killed the actual King and is destroyed England's main field Army in the government's Paradise so in 1066 you're able to march from the Hastings to Suffolk to Oxfordshire and back to London relatively unopposed that is not the situation that Palmer would have faced um similarly a hundred years later in 1688 um what what is not fully factored in with well this is a successful Invasion twenty or thousand men including 50 that army of about 14 000. um left the Shelt to invade England but they didn't land in Kent they didn't land north of the Thames because it was too obvious and that's what James would have expected they landed in Torbay Endeavor to be prepared to March all the way across the Salisbury Plain to get to the other side of the Thames and then to be able to attack London so successful invasions of England have either been the the King has been dumb enough to fight them on the beaches and lose or um the the William William of Orange William III uh worked out the problem and so took a massive flanking maneuver all the way to Devon to March back up to London so at the time it wasn't as bad as people thought um you could you could raise a sort of a subject militia of around 50 000 it's not good enough to take on partners aren't they but it is good enough to ruin a supply chain and the great thing about English Maritime Logistics is that you could pull the 600 000 men on on valkyrin to join the Army in Tilbury faster than Palmer could March anywhere and because he'd arrived in barges he didn't have sea control for any supplies or Logistics so he's doomed yeah he's doomed one of the sad things about the English Narrative of invasion being really scary is that no one and luckily for the troops involved no one's been dumb enough to attempt an invasion by military Invasion by barge so yeah we haven't realized just how tragic that would have been for the people involved and it continues to be a bogeyman to this day but Palmer had even if there was no Dutch Fleet bottling him up in in Dunkirk Palmer would have been lucky to get his barges across if a Southwestern blue and send them all to the North Sea or to the Bottom of the Sea and even if he did land troops and Market they couldn't have done anything of any use and I think this is one of the another key thing that people sometimes don't appreciate is that you know if you look on Google Maps satellite view or something the south of England looks relatively flat relatively easy to conquer um assuming you can get off the beaches because a lot of the cliffs are not particularly forgiving but when you look at say the defensive plans are in place for World War II you actually notice there are some rather nasty terrain features you've got the South Downs which are pretty steep I mean you know theoretically if you can occupy Portsmouth Landing is easy enough if you know the channel and if you can defeat the Royal Navy which okay those are fairly big asks but Portsmouth itself relatively flat relatively easy to occupy there's a socking ridge right behind it which is a perfect way to just bottle up any occupiers um and most of the rest of the South Downs are like that assuming you can get past that and there are a few passes through there you then come to the other set of downs ups and downs and so forth around London which are similar to rain and World War II plants basically pointed out that if you're an offensive attacking tank force there's about four places you can come through and they're very easy to predict we should for those of you who are in the UK that's basically where the M23 joins the M25 where the A3 joins the M25 basically where the roads join around down 25 because that's why they're there in the first place um and then as you mentioned especially back in those days the vast majority of London whereas these days to be honest London by square mileage is actually more south of the river than North but back in those days almost all of London is north of the river um city of London is the docks are you've got southwark and burmansey and Greenwich where we are now places like that but there for the most part almost independent towns and southwark is just kind of the ancillary of London where they stick all the stuff they don't actually want in London like tanneries and bath houses so it's not a particularly great loss if someone Burns Suffolk down it's a way of signaling and you're angry with London but that's about it so if you want to knock out the economic heart of England you have to get up for the Thames and that's a lot tougher job than it might seem these days because of course nowadays you've got loads of bridges and tunnels well back then you'd have London Bridge which is fairly easy to close off or destroy and these days you've got embankment and various other features of London that have narrowed the Thames the Thames back then was a lot wider and a lot more difficult to cross so it's a it's a huge huge barrier to a successful Invasion assuming that the people of England at the time are willing to resist which not to put too fine a point on it but given that at the time most of England was ostensibly in the eyes of most of Europe a bunch of Heretics would probably be burned at the stake if the Spanish did take over they had a little bit more of a stake in this than just nationalism yes so we've got Palmer stuck in Dunkirk he's got Dutch fly boats which are preventing him from linking up with Armada we've got the English league kind of harassing the Armada as it goes along but then we have this kind of break point eventually where the Armada is scattered and it ends up being sent off so how does this all come together we've got an antwer basically locked out we've got Palmer kept in place what stops the Spanish from just sitting waiting for an opportunity where the Dutch get bored and go away or someone baits the Dutch out to fight them or something like that so at this crucial Point how does the Armada lose albeit now the decks shot against them Protestant wind and that's precisely the point there's this wonderful honest portrait that does not show an English Fleet engaging the Spanish treat other than with barships because um for two or three days the um Spanish Portuguese Fleet regained Battle Order tried to beat back into the channel North Sea Junction and tried to give battle to the English Fleet but the winds were against them and it's it's important to stress as well the what the the there is no doubt that English ships are a critical mass of English ships had some important advantages over Spanish and Portuguese ships I'm one of the biggest was um they were considerably more handy um they could sail much closer to the wind because they were basically Commerce Raiders um it was dare I say that this might annoy many of you listen as it was like sending battle Cruisers into battle groups you don't depending on which proves this I know that's dangerous you probably want to edit that out it's fine people will argue that yeah the the the very early battle Cruisers they they could not engage closely enough you can only destroy the better example um is 1592 on the other side of the world if you want to know how to take down an invasion Fleet of great ships look at what the Koreans did with Turtle ships that's what's needed England didn't have anything like that so essentially the the main reason why the Spanish Portuguese Fleet had to give up was because the wind blew and they only had about a month's worth of Provisions left on their ships and you knead about that to get back to Lisbon and back to the Spanish Coast so basically The Invasion timed out because of the logistical requirements of feeding your men for the return Voyage because there was nowhere to go yeah and then of course we I mean obviously as you mentioned the English keep hold of the mouth of the shell Estuary for a little while longer um presumably mostly out of paranoia just because it's not the last Spanish Armada no indeed there's quite a few I mean there's the English Armada which doesn't end particularly well either but a succession of increasingly desperate increasingly terrible failures when other Spanish armadas come along which again is another part of the whole story that doesn't often get told but of course for those of you who love your ships out there the Armada is a critical turning point in at the time England's outlook on the world and particularly on the Navy's outlook on what its role is and and how it's to be utilized in the future and you can see this in a number of elements if you look at Royal Navy battle honors the very first battle honor is the Armada the Royal Navy depending on who you ask has either been in existence since Henry VIII or Alfred the Great either of but they have fought multiple battles Battle of the solent where the Mary Rose was lost for example before this but none of those are recorded the Armada starts the battle honor System and also if you look at the listings of the English ships you'll see a lot of very very familiar names now some of them where they were just named after their owners or whatever obviously have gone by the wayside but if you think of ships like Revenge Victory Arc Royal swiftshore tread nort all of these and more are all there at the Armada and they're not all Royal ships some of them are but a lot of them are privately owned but because of the exploits that they take part in during Armada it embeds those names embed themselves in the consciousness of the royal Navy to the extent they're constantly reused and some of the ships whose names you see in the Armada list are in service under obviously new guises even today and have been almost continuously ever since so it's a hugely important element of English History not just because the Spanish didn't manage to take over but from from the foundational I guess mythology if you like of the royal Navy but as we've been discussing there's huge other elements involved in this you've got the English army at the Shelt you've got the Dutch who a few decades later we'd end up a war with um uh operating off of the coast you've got the weather which is a huge influencing factor for any kind of age of sale Expedition and it's important to remember all of these in combination because any one of those take away any one of those things and there is going to be some kind of Landing whether or not it succeeds that's another matter for land-based Naval and land-based historians to argue over um but you can't just emphasize any one element but I think if I could say something relatively controversial yeah I think there's one thing that you you can emphasize and needs to be emphasized and that is that the key to defeating the Spanish Armada was what was essentially it could be termed a British expeditionary Force was a deployment of English troops and the key Belgian Coast before trouble started and the foundation myth of the Spanish Armada has persuaded a critical mass of decision makers in England and then Britain that they could rely on a blue water defense the the Blue Water Narrative of the Spanish Armada is effectively a Spanish victory until it was too late for them to do anything they could sail through the channel and hang around the channel North Sea Junction without the English ships being able to do anything about it so there is a I think an enormous danger of the the mistelling of the Spanish Armada has meant that after walsingham's brilliant idea to formalize the occupation of valkyrim English History British history since then has been responding to an army that's already taken Belgium which is considerably more difficult to dislodge and all of the great Wars that that Britain fought since have been primarily to dislodge armies from Belgium before they can develop Maritime power and if only they knew what Walsingham was up to we might have had a better proactive policy and strategy before it all went wrong yeah and that's something that's I mean obviously discuss away in the comments but it's certainly something that's worth considering because if you look further down the line through various great abnormals of the royal Navy Admiral Fisher for example famously said that the British army is a projectile to be fired by the Royal Navy he knew how important land troops were he just didn't think that petite was a particularly good idea to try and go man to man with a European Army in a straight-up field battle he was talking about specific operations where the Navy would take the Army to a place that the one land that needed to be occupied to keep the Seas safe and you see that throughout British strategy during the entire Empire period we already mentioned Gibraltar you know Britain's not interested in taking the rest of Spain just half Gibraltar great we've got the Mediterranean they open the Suez Canal we'll have Egypt everyone's going around to the spice trade right we'll take South Africa specifically Cape Town they don't don't actually they don't actually care that much about the rest of South Africa until the boars start getting a bit annoying just Cape Town because you then small element of land controls the sea and look across the rest of the world and you'll see this repeated time and time again so in many ways you could say for the smarter of the British tacticians who exercise these decisions to actually go and occupy these places it probably all starts here with the people who are actually looking at and going okay yeah we didn't lose at sea but perhaps we actually won on land exactly well there you go everyone another new take on the special model I think one that's definitely got a lot of legs to it I'm looking forward to the absolute Firestorm I'm sure there's going to be argued in the comments but hey that's what discussion is for so thank you very much to uh to Paul for coming and talking to us and thank you very much to the National Maritime Museum and the Armada room here in Queen's house in Greenwich as I said before please do come and visit it if you can there's loads of excellent exhibits to visit but obviously if you're particularly interested in the Armada not only have you got this painting here and as I mentioned before the the big battle painting behind us you've also got portraits of the various major characters involved surrounding us and there will be new and interesting exhibitions because at the time that this is being filmed Queen's house is actually closed because they're renovating it to put in new exhibits so that will all be brand new even if you've visited it before there's something new to see and by the time that this goes up they'll be reopened and you can come and see all of that so thanks very much listening everyone and see you again in another video

Channel: Drachinifel

Views: 71,521

Keywords: Spanish Armada, Zeeland, Walcheren, Antwerp, 1588

Id: wVdthv0GN_s

Length: 45min 11sec (2711 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 11 2023