CAROLYN QUINN Sixteen minutes past seven, a top to bottom review of the National Curriculum has been promised by the Conservatives if they win the Election. Michael Howard told his…

MICHAEL Campaigning for Michael Howard before the recent Election the former Chief Inspector of Schools, Chris Woodhead, told the Today programme how worried he was about how little school students knew.

CHRIS WOODHEAD Take history where a recent survey showed that half of 16 to 20 year olds didn’t know that Drake defeated the Armada.

MICHAEL Well actually the Commander of the English Fleet was Lord Howard of Effingham, and as for Drake…

FELIPE The English do have this sort of sentimental attachment to Drake, but his fellow commanders would not have shared those sentiments. Sir Martin Frobisher thought that Drake was a coward for skulking off during the Armada fight, which he clearly did, he exchanged a few shots on the first day of the major battle, then he disappeared from action and we don’t know where he was, presumably he was looking for prizes as he always did, er but on the, on the day of the great battle Drake seemed effectively to have contributed zero, and his reputation as the defeater of the Armada is unjustified however you look at it.

MICHAEL If Drake was thought such a charlatan at the time, why do we remember him? Well, Queen Elizabeth favoured him – he brought in a lot of cash to the Royal Purse from his piracy – and to the Elizabethans he was somewhere between David Beckham and Richard Branson. Subsequent generations of historians and politicians have found other reasons to venerate him.

RODGER In the nineteenth century it seems to me there is a sort of nationalisation of the English, a patriotic naval myth, er and Drake and his friends become the private property of the Royal Navy, the epitome of manly Protestant Naval heroes, er and of course as the idea of Empire comes to be fashionable in the mid nineteenth century they are connected with it, almost entirely a bogus connection because if Queen Elizabeth had any Empire at all it certainly didn’t go further away than Ireland, but um for the mid and late Victorians at any rate it was a, an obvious and useful connection to establish, and so the Elizabethan explorers and pirates were hastily converted into manly Evangelicals and pioneers of the British Empire.

MICHAEL Even if we’ve overdone the idolatry of Drake a bit, it’s surely crucial to the English Armada tradition that the flotilla that Philip the Second sent was a vast naval force, hugely superior to the plucky English underdogs, after all out of that is borne the salvation myth of Protestant England. There is though a set of statistics that we’ve forgotten.

RODGER Well the interesting thing about Spain, which was the great military super power of the age, is that it didn’t really have a navy at all. Essentially the, the Spanish Armada was an enormous convoy under escort of a number of larger armed merchant ships with only a very few proper warships among them, mainly actually ex-Portuguese warships. On the English side Queen Elizabeth’s entire Navy was present, but that was only about twenty-five ships, and there were about the same number of very well armed privately owned ships, but if you actually look at reasonably well armed fighting ships the total was about forty-five or fifty on both sides, with the English ships considerably better armed than the Spaniards.

MICHAEL So, both sides were matched pretty much ship for ship in combat, and the English were better armed and more manoeuvrable. In which case, why did the English make such a meal of defeating this slow moving, poorly armed flotilla?

RODGER The English had specialised in heavy gun firing, which the Spaniards did not have much need to do. The English, as so often is the case when one has a wonderful new weapon system, placed the highest value on it and were convinced that it was going to win the war in an afternoon. Er when it didn’t they were rather stuck. They swooped down on the enemy and fired their heavy guns, and they carried on firing their heavy guns, they expended a prodigious quantity of powder, but they didn’t actually succeed in breaking up the solidity of the Spanish defensive formation or stopping the Armada, which continued its majestic way down the Channel.

MICHAEL For a full week, the English navy pursued the Armada – arranged in its defensive crescent formation, attacking it with its heavy cannon, to little effect, and falling away. By the 29th of July, the fleet was off the coast of Calais, waiting to embark The Duke of Parma’s veteran Army of Flanders, ready for invasion. And that seems to have been the Armada’s Achilles heel. Moored off a coast line thick with Dutch rebel forces and pursued by the entire English Navy, the Spanish were vulnerable to being set ablaze, and Professor Rodgers thinks that they had little chance of making a successful rendezvous with the Parma’s invasion force.

RODGER I don’t see how they could have succeeded. They finished up stuck in a, in a strategic situation which they can’t get out of, and if the Dutch had mysteriously disappeared and if the weather had been perfect and if the English had done nothing, perhaps they might have succeeded in ushering them across the Channel, but of course the weather wasn’t perfect, the Dutch didn’t disappear and, and the English did something very quickly. They did the obvious thing, if you have an enemy fleet anchored immediately to lured of you, er they improvise fire ships to force them out of the anchorage, and they were driven up into the North Sea, and so the Spanish Fleet disappears away into the North Sea, and the English who meanwhile have totally run out of ammunition and follow them far enough to see them safely off the premises.

FELIPE I don’t think you can call that a triumph for the English, a triumph for the English in their home waters that close to home where they had all the advantages er of the closeness, also the supply being um susceptible of easy reinforcement had they been well organised enough to deliver it, having the advantage of the, the weather, having the Armada pinned against these very dangerous coasts with the wind against it. With all those things really they should have mopped up on that day, and that’s why when the battle was over the Spaniards were exultant and actually, you know, thought that God had intervened to spare them.

MUSIC Spanish celebratory

MICHAEL Ahead of the Spanish lay the stormy waters of the North Sea and a circumnavigation of Scotland and Ireland. Nearly a third of their ships were lost to the rough seas and rocky shorelines. But can we call this a decisive victory for the English?

FELIPE To some extent the storm acted as a clearing house for a lot of vessels that were due for the scrap yard anyway and enabled the Spanish Monarchy to rebuild its fleet and over the next few years the Spanish Navy really is impregnable worldwide. What the world concluded from the Armada campaign wasn’t that England was so superior at sea as to be invulnerable, quite the reverse, it showed how vulnerable England was, and the English knew that.

MICHAEL England was very vulnerable and for the next fifteen years, the English lived the waking nightmare of Spanish invasion. The Spanish didn’t disappoint. We have the perception that the Armada was in some way the climax of the campaign against England by Spain…Nicolas Rodger

RODGER Well it was the beginning of the war, in fact you see the war had only just started, er it went on until after Queen Elizabeth died in 1603. Spain mounted two further major invasion attempts of England, both of which were defeated by bad weather, but both of which were actually serious threats, moreover in neither case were the English well informed in advance that it was coming, and if they hadn’t been wrecked by gales they might easily have managed to mount a successful surprise landing. In both cases moreover they were intending to land directly in England, they’d given up the disastrous idea of picking up the troops from Flanders, so the strategic plan was much sounder in both cases, er and it was substantially good luck that er the English got away with it.

MICHAEL These Armadas in 1596 and 1597, are almost completely written out of the history of the Elizabethan period. In 1988, hundreds of beacons were lit around the country to mark the four hundredth anniversary of one armada – nobody noticed the anniversary of the storm which scattered the 1597 invasion fleet.

These second and third Armadas were forced back by the weather, not the English Navy…but in a reccy of possible invasion sites in Cornwall in 1595, Spain had tasted what an invasion of England might be like…as did the English....

FX Sea noise

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Content last updated: 24/05/2005

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