2023-08-20 00:24:50
Philip II of Habsburg, on whose empire the sun never set, and Elizabeth I Tudor, unexpected Queen of England, were obsessed with overthrowing each other. The Spanish monarch dreamed of subduing England at any cost. He tried in the summer of 1588, but the largest Spanish armada suffered the most catastrophic and remembered disaster in our naval history. A failed Felipe II had to swallow the infinite pride deposited in his Great and Happy Armada, which could not fulfill its stubborn mission of deposing the English queen and ‘re-Catholicizing’ her country. The wrecked ships in turn sank the aspirations of Felipe II to dominate all of Europe, awarded a sweet victory to the British sovereign and fed a black legend riddled with propaganda hoaxes.
Geoffrey Parker (Nottingham, 1943), a professor at Ohio University and an authority on the history of the 16th and 17th centuries, signs with Colin Martin (Edinburgh, 1939) an expanded edition of his monumental essay ‘The Great Armada’ (Planet). . It is a very complete review of the study that best tells and analyzes what happened to the so-called Invincible Armada. With its 888 pages -more than 200 notes- it is almost a new work and the portrait of an era.
Parker pored over a mountain of information in Spanish and Dutch archives, contrasting his findings with those of wrecks studied by Martin, a marine archaeologist and director of excavations for several Spanish shipwrecks in Scotland and Ireland. This is the third expansion of the essay, after those of 2002 and 2009, and includes unpublished documents and novel analyses.
Obsessed by “the story of the greatest fleet ever seen since the creation of the world”, Parker and Martin destroy some myths that have been in force for centuries in the fallacious British historiography.
black fate
At the end of the summer of 1588, Felipe II articulated his attack on England from two sides: with the gigantic fleet that sailed from La Coruña, Asturias, Santander and Vizcaya, and from his domains in the Netherlands. He wanted to expel Elizabeth I Tudor, the great enemy of the ultra-Catholic Spanish monarch, from the throne. Her kingdoms disputed control of the Atlantic and overseas trade and their sovereigns were the champions of Catholicism and Anglican Protestantism.
Detail of the portrait of Felipe II of Habsburg painted by Sofonisba Anguissola. CR
The largest fleet ever deployed found its black fate between the English Channel and the coasts of Ireland. ‘The Invincible’, according to the sarcastic British nickname picked up by the sailor and historian Cesáreo Fernández-Duro, was the Great Armada. It was made up of 130 ships and 30 support vessels. Felipe II’s original plan called for a double naval attack led by the veteran Tercios de Flanders (about 27,000 men), led by the Duke of Parma and with the rest of the fleet under the control of the inexperienced Duke of Medina Sidonia (19,000 troops). ).
The mismanagement of Felipe II, the iron English defense and its Dutch allies and above all the virulent and unpredictable storms dismasted a naval challenge that took the lives of 11,000 men. Everything went wrong. The Spanish planned to attack at the landings while the British intended to fight in the open sea. The English fleet had lighter ships and longer-range guns. But the fury of the sea was primed with the Spanish ships.
“At that time, no one could predict the outcome and it is not necessary to denigrate Spain for failing to achieve its objectives, nor is it necessary to attribute the liberation of England to its innate superiority,” the authors argue. “Rather than starting from the jingoism, xenophobia, and speculative theorizing that have been prominent features of so many previous studies,” they draw “on a vast corpus of information gleaned from the protagonists and from the physical remains of shipwrecks.” They state with evidence that “The Armada constituted a threat to England of immeasurable proportions.”
Detail of the portrait of Elizabeth I Tudor, Queen of England, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard. CR
“History stands by itself and the only past that must be forgotten are the myths,” they state, acknowledging that the Spanish was “an unprecedented failure, yes, but that would not serve as an instructive experience for the other side either.” They provide detailed data on men, state of the ships, positions, inventories of ammunition and artillery, with letters from the protagonists and documents.
They include a chapter with more fiction than history that speculates on the consequences of a Spanish victory. A counterfactual exercise on what could have happened if the Great Armada had managed to land in England. They agree in affirming that, without that adverse climate, the possibilities of Spanish success were quite high, as Edward P. Cheney, historian of the Tudor period, maintained in 1923 before the American Historical Association: «The morning of August 10, 1588 […] the wind blew steadily from the southwest. If the wind had blown from any other direction on that crucial day, the Spanish Armada might have seen its name justified and carried out the invasion of England. (p. 563).
falsehoods
The first of the four parts of the essay deals with the origins of the Philippine and Elizabethan navies and analyzes the political situation on both sides. The second studies the context and preparations for combat, dissected in the third part. The fourth studies the consequences of the conflict, the search for those responsible, the writings on the feelings of the Spanish and the political reactions of both sides. It collects falsehoods installed in the English imagination, such as that “the Spanish carried whips prepared for the torment of the men and women of England” (p. 601), or that visitors to the Tower of London in the eighteenth century could admire “the thumbcrushers designed to make the English confess where they had hidden their money, as well as Spanish ties, torture devices made of iron designed to imprison the head, arms and feet of English heretics. (p.602). Pure black legend.
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