I think most people think of the Spanish Armada as an issue that only involved England and Spain.

The war between England and Spain in the 1580s was just one part of acomplicated struggle that included religious wars in France, a Protestantrevolt in the Netherlands against Spain, and the old non-religious rivalry between the French and Spanish monarchies.

The key figure was Philip II of Spain, who as the greatest ruler of the time, and self-appointed champion of Catholic revival, was involved in all of the struggles.  The Armada, a great accomplishment from one point of view, symbolizes his defeat, his
failure to act as the political and religious arbiter of Europe.

In the year, 1584, in an attempt to settle the situation both in France and the Netherlands, Philip had acted boldly.  He struck a formal alliance with the ultra-orthodox Guises and their Holy League, who were dead set against the Protestant claimant, Henri of Navarre being recognized as the next king of France, and against any compromise with Protestantism.  Elizabeth of England, frightened by the treaty, immediately sent troops and her favorite minister to Holland to prevent a rebel collapse.  An international war, as big as those of Charles V, began, this one pitting zealous Catholic forces against the strongest Protestant movements of northwestern Europe.  By 1587, Philip had decided that the key to victory was an invasion of England.  In March of 1587, he ordered the assembly of a fleet to attack that country.

The Enterprise of England, as Philip called his project, was more than just the launching of a fleet.  Mind you, the fleet became the biggest the world had ever known.  But the fleet was simply a tool in a larger scheme.The Armada itself was simply there to seize control of the English Channel. This would make it possible to move the Spanish Army of Flanders, under the command of the Duke of Parma, across the Channel to England.  Parma, probably the best of Philip's generals, had turned that army into a
fearsome weapon, and succeeded in taking the coast of Flanders.  He had no safe deep-water ports in the Netherlands, but was willing to take his troops on barges across the narrow straits, once the straits were under Spanish control.  It sounds like a crazy scheme, but Parma was the kind of man who might make it work [Parker, 135-6].

Once the Spanish army was in England, Parma was to seize London and hope that the English Catholics of the north and west would rise to aid him.  If London was taken and the rising took place, Philip would have England.  If these things failed to occur, Parma was to force Elizabeth tomake concessions:  to tolerate Catholic worship in England, to surrenderall English-held Dutch towns to Spain, and to pay a war indemnity.

But a third element, besides the fleet and the army was necessary if this operation was to succeed.  France would have to be distracted.Divided as it was, the French King Henri III controlled Normandy and could make trouble for the enterprise in England.  Henri's internal enemies, the Catholic League and the Duke of Guise, would have to be stirred up against
him.

So the year 1587 was a very busy year for all concerned.
 

• War continued in the Netherlands.
•  England was quite aware that it was in danger.  Francis Drake took a fleet against Cadiz, Spain's major Atlantic port, in hopes of disrupting Spain's ability to sail against England.  He did a lot of damage, and took a treasure ship on the way home, but did not stop the preparations for the Armada.
• In France, the Three Henris were fighting each other in a conflict called the War of the Three Henris in their honor:

• they were Henri the king of Navarre (Huguenot),
• Henri the Duke of Guise (Catholic), and
• Henri III, the king of France, just trying to survive.

In May of 1588, when the Armada was about to sail, Mendoza's plan was sprung.  Henri III strukc back at the Paris League, whose preachers practically denounced him by name from the pulpit:  they called him Vilain Herodes, an anagram of the King's name (Henri de Valois) that meant "the villainous Herod."  King Henri decided to take control of the city by bringing
in Swiss mercenaries.

The plan backfired terribly.  The Paris League had barrels and cobblestones and dirt prepared, and on the morning of the 12th,
threw up barricades in the streets, trapping the Swiss between them.  The only thing that prevented the soldiers from being massacred was the intervention of Henri of Guise, who had entered the capital in defiance of the king's order.  After this street-fighting victory, Guise went to thepalace and presented himself to the king, ostensibly very humbly but in reality as his master.

Henri fooled him:  the next day he fled Paris.

But Guise was still in a dominant position, and forced the French king to call a meeting of the Estates-General to reform the kingdom to his and the League's liking.  From the Spanish point of view, things were going well.  The French king would do nothing to help England.

At the end of May, the Most Fortunate Armada, as the Spanish called it, set sail from Lisbon.  It was a huge fleet, 130 ships:  huge galleons, armed merchantmen, galleys, and hulks filled with supplies.  There were thousands of soldiers, hundreds of priests, a medical corps, and land cannon meant for the siege of London.

The English were prepared, as much as they could be.  When the Armada got to the channel at end of July, after hard sailing against contrary winds, it found a fleet of 90 some ships under the command of Charles Howard and Francis Drake facing them.  It was the English fleet's job to keep the Spaniards from taking a port.

The Spanish fleet, on the other hand,  had to destroy this defensive force, coordinate with Parma, and help the Army of Flanders cross the channel.

From July 29 to August 9, the two fleets sailed up the channel, the Spanish in front, the English behind, each side looking for
advantage.  Both got unpleasant surprises:  the Spanish found themselves facing the most maneouverable ships they had ever seen, ships with quick-loading, long-range cannons called culverins, that could pound the Spanish fleet from a distance.  The English advantage was cancelled out, however,by the incredible discipline of the Spanish fleet.  The Armada adopted a crescent shaped formation that it held firmly no matter how the wind shifted or the fight went.  The English cannon did little damage to the
Armada.

The Spanish fleet could not knock out the English one, because it did not have light manueverable ships.  The commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, sent a dispatch to Parma, asking him to send some Dutch-style ships, which he knew would do the trick.  Then the crossing could go forward.

Unknown to Medina Sidonia, Parma had no ships, just his barges.In fact, Parma he was blockaded by the Dutch, who after a certain amount of delay, had sent part of their fleet to guard the coast.  The Dutch ships had shallow drafts, and even if the Armada had beaten the English, the big Spanish ships would not have been able to chase them off. In the event, Parma sent no ships to help the Armada and his army never moved.

The destruction of the Armada, already rendered futile, happened when the English scattered the fleet with fireships.  Then the weather changed and scattered the fleet further.  Almost all of it would have gotten home, except that its supplies began to go bad.  Ships with no food or good water tried to land in Scotland and Ireland and went on the rocks.  About a third
of the ships were lost and many more of the men -- even after reaching Spain hundreds of them died from disease and the effects of bad food.

The failure of the Armada was a blow to Spain.  In fact Philip II got very depressed, and for a while he wanted to die.  In England, the legend of Drake, the fireships, and the great wind, the English Kamikaze, soon became legend.  But it was hardly the end of the war.

The center of action simply switched to France.  Here things were going well for the pro-Spanish forces.  An Estates General was gathering in the city of Blois, an assembly packed with Leaguers who would confirm that the Duke of Guise control overthe royal government.

The Estates General, however, turned out to be Guise's ultimate defeat.  Henri III had prepared a plot against the man he considered his worst enemy.  One morning during a royal council meeting, Guise was asked to step into the king's room.  When he did, the royal bodyguard stabbed him to death.  King Henri did not live more than a few months longer -- early
in 1589, he too met an assassin's knife as he approached a still-hostile Paris to besiege it.

When Henri III died, his cousin the king of Navarre claimed the throne.  As Henri IV, the Huguenot leader could count on his own people, and many Catholic politiques who were sick of civil war and hostile to the Guise-Spanish alliance.  But though the Duke of Guise was dead, the League survived under the leadership of his brother, the Duke of Mayenne, and the Paris Sixteen, who had control of the capital.

In 1589 Philip was still willing to support the League, and so war broke out.  The new King, Henri IV, had to regain the capital.  The Guises and the League hoped to defeat him somehow and put some catholic claimant on the throne.

From 1589 to 1598, Henri IV fought Mayenne, the Paris League, and the Duke of Parma.  It was a formidable task, even with the help of England, and only made slightly easier when Parma was killed in 1592.  It early on became clear to Henri that he would never really be king of France unless he gave up his Protestantism and became Catholic, thus disarming all but
the most fanatical leaguers.

Henri did this in 1593, supposedly saying "Paris is worth a mass."  At the same time he assured his Protestant friends that they would be able to practice their religion freely in the areas of their strength.  The next year, Paris, which had been racked by
conflict between the League Sixteen and the normal leaders of the city,opted for normality and accepted the king.  Over the next four years, Henri IV slowly regained control of his kingdom.  In May of 1598, a few months before Philip II died, a treaty of peace was signed between France and Spain.

When Philip died, his French policy was obviously a failure.  France had not been lost to Protestantism, but neither had Protestantism been wiped out.  The long intervention in France had merely reunited the country against Spain, under the most capable king in decades.  Furthermore, the use of Parma's armies in France instead of the Netherlands had given the
rebels there a much needed breathing space.

The Dutch rebels, now under the leadership of Maurice, the son of William the Silent, were able from about 1590 to stabilize a military frontier along the major rivers, roughly where the modern boundary with Belgium is now.  Spain would continue to
fight the United Provinces until 1609, and again from 1618-1648, but without success.  By the 1590s, the Dutch had effectively won their independence.

 The details of these wars are confusing and hard to keep track of, but they are worth the long discussion we have given them for the following reasons.
 

• Only by outlining them do can we get an idea of their size and impact

• Both the religious wars in France and the revolt of the Netherlands exposed the fragility of the social structure and of monarchical power.    The two countries, which had been transformed from a collection of provinces by the demands of the central government, were torn apart by a basic challenges to that authority.
• Resentment of the endless and ruinous demands of kings was one fuel for those challenges; the other was religious sentiment, moderate and radical.  The last element made the mixture explosive.  Religion had the potential to unite members of all classes against the traditional power of the king.  It made possible dedicated organizations, like the Huguenot movement, the Holy League, or the Sea Beggars, comparable to the revolutionary parties of the 20th century. These in turn transformed ordinary struggles for power into ferocious civil wars.

But radical parties were not very good at gaining power.  As had been proved already at Munster, under the early Anabaptists, religion could release the resentments of the urban middle and lower classes, people especially inclined toward Protestantism, in a very scary manner.  Ghent, Antwerp, and Paris all produced popular dictatorships in the 1580s and 90s; in the first two the party in charge was Calvinist, in the third Catholic.In both cases, the nobility and the richest townsmen took fright, and
joined with people who should have been their religious enemies.  Many people in Flanders and Brabant found it possible to reconcile themselves to Spanish rule when faced with social revolution that might end their privileges.  The excesses of the Holy League strengthened the alliance between politique Catholics and Huguenots.

Indeed both in the Netherlands and France, a moderate settlement resulted.  Henry IV, once king, assured his old Huguenot friends of toleration and allowed them to maintain strongholds against any Catholic threat.  The free United Provinces in the
Northern Netherlands were officially Calvinist, but lay feeling kept the ministers from being too rigorous and many people remained Catholic.  Even in the southern, Spanish controlled Netherlands, religious persecution was not re-instated.  Attacks
on non-conformity took the form of witch trials instead.

The failure of Philip II is as noteworthy as the failure of the radicals.  Philip was as hardworking a king as one can imagine.  He was not stupid.  He had unprecedented resources at his command.  We've seen how big the Armada was.  Despite legend, the Enterprise of England might have succeeded, in different circumstances.  In the Netherlands, the Spanish war effort was immense and impressive, especially under Alba.  During the 1580s, the Army of Flanders had more soldiers, a bigger budget, and a better credit rating than the kingdom of England.

But all this effort did not make Spanish power secure.  The original purpose of Philip's policies in the Netherlands, for instance, had been to to make the rich Netherlands help pay imperial expenses.  Instead the war became the biggest drain on Spanish resources, which even with the inflow of American silver were never sufficient to pay the bills.  The Spanish army instead had to live off the land, destroying the wealth it had been sent to seize.   Philip's major initiatives in France and England were
equally ill-starred.

Philip's governments plunged deeper and deeper into debt to finance his wars.  Castile, which paid the most, began to lose
population in the 1590s, due to severe taxation and pestilence.   Much thesame thing happened in France.  During the 1590s, peasants who were driven to the limit by war, plundering and taxation rose in huge peasant revolts in Normandy, Provence, and other parts of the south.  Their depredations and the efforts to put them down addedto the devastation caused by Huguenot, League, royal and Spanish armies.

The horrors of this situation did not escape contemporaries.  In the countries that had gone through religious war, voices were raised against religious fanaticism.  This was coupled with a rejection of the political radicalism and popular movements that had accompanied the civil wars.  As Garrett Mattingly, speaking of England, put it:

     [The English had had their civil wars, but they knew that they] would
     prove mere armed riots beside the horrors of a civil war embittered by
     religion.  Men, now bearded, had been frightened when children by the
     tale of St. Bartholemew's, and it was not only children who were
     frightened.  The blood-brimmed gutters of Paris, the corpses floating
     in the Loire, the smoking desolation in Normandy, were not old wives'
     tails...So when parsons reminded their parishioners that a land where
     men denied the authority of their rightful rulers and drew their
     swords on one anohter was a land accursed there were tightened lips
     and grim nods among the congregation, and when the people bent their
     heads to pray for [the Queen] there was desparate sincerity in their
     voices.  The deepest longing of the troubled and divided sixteenth
     century was for unity and peace, and the only effective symbol men
     could find for the social order they craved was the person of a
     monarch [21-22].

     The experience of sixteenth century France in particular was in the years to come one of the best advertisements for absolutism.  But that experience was not quite enough to bring religious wars to an end.  In the seventeenth century, royal ambition and sectarian fury would plunge much of Europe into more of the same, only worse.

 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Garrett Mattingly,  The Defeat of the Spanish Armada

Copyright (C) 1999, Steven Muhlberger.