I don't want to answer for Vizzer, to whom you address your question, but there is an important point about Puritanism here too. And also one that relates directly to the Armada and its time.

Have a look at English literature of the period - noble and gutter - and see when you can spot the term "papist" creep into the vernacular with the semantic overtones with which we now identify it. Amazingly, although one could be completely forgiven for presuming the opposite, the Armada and its immediate aftermath did not herald a propagandist backlash against Catholics in that way (even Elizabeth's use of "popish" was designed to distinguish between "good" Catholics and those who actively vaunted the pope's traditional but now unwelcome political role in English affairs). But equally amazingly the religious adherents who did find themselves suffering a rather vigorous and often cruel backlash from 1588 until the mid 90s were in fact the Puritans, and indeed the various strains with which that term was also identified, such as Presbyterians etc.

The reasons for this are complex but what lies at their root is - of all things - the right to preach, an incredibly thorny issue at the time. Elizabeth, like her father, and like the Catholic Church too, was of the strong opinion that sermons were bad news and that mass should stick to liturgy. Preaching represented political activity and could never be tolerated, even if it purported to support the status quo. It was not within her control and was therefore potentially treasonable behaviour almost by default. Puritans on the other hand insisted on their right to organise a nationwide network of preachers, beholden to no bishop and - horror of horrors - recruited largely from the then middle classes.

Spain, and by extension Catholicism, might have been currently in the state's bad books, but both were old adversaries who had often proven good allies. Crucially, they were expressions of elite power and therefore completely compatible in terms of expectation and diplomacy with Elizabeth's own regime. The Puritans on the other hand, by their very definition, were anarchical underminers of the very authority which intended to deal with Catholic super-powers as an equal. It was they, and not Catholics, who were the real enemy within.

A dictionary of slang published in the late 1580s therefore would have struggled to find more than a handful of pejorative terms used for Catholics in the vernacular as it then stood. For Protestants of a puritanical bent however the list was already long indeed.

I take your point, nordmann, but your use of the expression "anarchical underminers" of authority is interesting: weren't the pamphleteers and playwrights viewed as the real "anarchists"?

I'm going to contradict myself now: I said above that the great divide was ideological, not "socio-economic". But I wonder. When push came to shove, did religion/ideology really matter any more? Remember Cromwell's/Mantel's pronouncements on this - it was those who signed the promissory notes who were now the growing power - everywhere. I've probably been reading too much Hilary Mantel, but how do the Antwerp bankers and their ilk fit into all this - if at all? Weren't the landed classes - including the Crown - usually up to their eyes in debt? Weren't the rising Protestant/Puritan class the money people - the bankers and the great merchant classes - and as such greatly to be feared?

Probably a daft idea, but what the heck. Thought it might be worth a mention. I seem to remember you writing something about this ages ago to do with Francis Bacon and the Cecils.

The Marprelate Pamphlets of 1588/89, re the dispute between Puritans and the Established Church;

http://www.anglicanlibrary.org/marprelate/

Thank you, Trike.

Some people think the Earl of Oxford was the scurrilous Martin - how that man found time for everything I do not know.

Here's Lyly's reply to Martin - great title: Pap With a Hatchet. Huff, Ruff and Snuff sounds like something thought up by Priscilla!

http://www.oxford-shakespeare.com/Nashe/Pap_With_Hatchet.pdf

I'm a big fan of following money trails no matter who, when or what the subject of discussion is historically. It invariably leads to more plausible theory regarding motive and conjectural background activity.

Elizabeth's state was hardly in ideologically sound waters itself. The notion of a Protestant superpower was still relatively novel and England was rather in the vanguard of testing out the whole diplomacy thing with state religion and its administration as a major bone of contention between engaging parties. Pragmatically she and her more intelligent advisors knew that regardless of ideological differences England was going to have to get along with at least some Catholic states at least some of the time, however begrudging or acrimonious such relations might prove to be. No one knew for sure, on either side. The last thing any of them needed was a surgent middle class making everything up as it went along regarding religion, social ethics and political structure. However if one was a member of that middle class the temptation to pin one's fortunes on participation in a movement that was already showing a tenacity and skill in attaching itself to industry and wealth was formidable. Henry's example had not been lost on keen observers - and nor had the huge windfalls and earnings that could be accrued from such bold departures.

It's hard to think of Puritans as yuppies, but there you go.

Francis Drake was a Puritan; not sure about the other English captains at the time of the Armada;



Then again, Drake had a personal dislike of the Spanish dating back to the 1560s;


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_San_Juan_de_Ul%C3%BAa_(1568)

Drake was more a Drakian. His notions of religion were puritanical, right enough, but he also behaved rather papally himself when at sea - even excommunicating his chaplain at one point after the man said that their recent bad fortune on a voyage was down to Drake having executed his co-commander Doughty (for witchcraft, amongst other things).

After the Marprelate Tracts and how rapidly puritanism fell out of official favour in their aftermath Drake quite sensibly shut up about religion, restricting himself to bowls commentaries and the like, while desisting from too many excommunications or issuing of bulls afterwards. Walter Raleigh apparently hated the guy and publicly pitied any seaman under his command whenever Drake was extolled. He also despised Drake's role in the evacuation of Roanoake, a venture that cost him 40,000 pounds and which - he reckoned - would have succeeded if Drake had done what he had been ordered to do and not simply evacuate colonists with a total abandonment of the colonial claim. Just to rub salt in the wound Drake actually charged the evacuees passage, which was paid out of Raleigh's funds as underwriter. Whatever Drake's religious sentiments they most certainly never steered him away from the propensity to rook his colleagues (and relatives) whenever it suited.

“It is well known that we fight in God’s cause.  So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits.  If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valour and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we will have on board) will make our victory certain.  But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt.  So we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.”
Unnamed Senior Spanish Commander to a Papal Diplomat

Apologies if this quote has been posted before but I could not see it scanning the posts.  It does rather support the initial contention that the Spanish needed 'a miracle' to win.

Tim of Aclea wrote:

“It is well known that we fight in God’s cause.  So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits.  If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valour and Spanish steel (and the great masses of soldiers we will have on board) will make our victory certain.  But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and many more long-range guns, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but stand aloof and knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt.  So we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.”
Unnamed Senior Spanish Commander to a Papal Diplomat

Apologies if this quote has been posted before but I could not see it scanning the posts.  It does rather support the initial contention that the Spanish needed 'a miracle' to win.

Yes Tim I had already read about the firepower and the accuracy of the English...I had also a vague rememberance that the English were ahead in technology of the gun too, as they used more "iron" guns instead of "bronze"
Did some quick research about this item:
http://www.alderneywreck.com/index.php/artefacts/guns-and-shot/bronze-to-iron
But the Spanish Armada seems also have to had iron guns...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Armada
"The fleet was composed of 130 ships, 8,000 sailors and 18,000 soldiers, and bore 1,500 brass guns and 1,000 iron guns."

And:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7899831.stm

As I understand it the English had better maneuverable and smaller ships and better gun techniques where they could engage as you said from longer distance...
Also confirmed by this link:
http://www3.gettysburg.edu/~tshannon/hist106web/site5/technology_armada.htm


Kind regards, Paul.

The English ships weren't particularly smaller in general - beware comparing tonnages. An English ton was more or less twice as large as a Spanish one, and Frobisher's "Triumph" was almost certainly the larges ship on either side, and the "urcas" or hulks, although armed, weren't designed as warships. It was the English, not the Spanish, who had gone the galleon route, which was far more maneuverable than the Spanish, which were mostly the old-fashioned "high charged" ships.

Paul and Uruk


I am very dubious about the wiki figures.  They only need to have one source to refer to and they can be put in the account.  I found that when I read several accounts of the Armada several years also that the figures for the amount of cannon that the Spanish fleet varied wildly.  I remember reading that one detailed study carried out in the 1960s has since been largely discredited.  The number of guns carried also takes no account that the English guns were mounted on four wheeled carriages while the Spanish guns were mounted on two wheel carriages more suitable for land warfare.  This made the Spanish guns very difficult to reload at sea and the rate of fire of the English ships, although slow in comparison with what the English Navy was later to achieve, was far superior to that achieved by the Spanish.


I would add that I doubt that Philip realistically expected to conquer England.  This was not 1066 and look how long the reconquest of the Netherlands was taking.  More likely he hoped to occupy London and then force Elizabeth to make a peace by which she removed her army from the Netherlands and stopped supporting the rebels and grant tolerance to English Catholics.


Tim

Tim of Aclea wrote:

Paul and Uruk


I am very dubious about the wiki figures.  They only need to have one source to refer to and they can be put in the account.  I found that when I read several accounts of the Armada several years also that the figures for the amount of cannon that the Spanish fleet varied wildly.  I remember reading that one detailed study carried out in the 1960s has since been largely discredited.  The number of guns carried also takes no account that the English guns were mounted on four wheeled carriages while the Spanish guns were mounted on two wheel carriages more suitable for land warfare.  This made the Spanish guns very difficult to reload at sea and the rate of fire of the English ships, although slow in comparison with what the English Navy was later to achieve, was far superior to that achieved by the Spanish.


I would add that I doubt that Philip realistically expected to conquer England.  This was not 1066 and look how long the reconquest of the Netherlands was taking.  More likely he hoped to occupy London and then force Elizabeth to make a peace by which she removed her army from the Netherlands and stopped supporting the rebels and grant tolerance to English Catholics.


Tim

Tim,

"I am very dubious about the wiki figures.  They only need to have one source to refer to and they can be put in the account.  I found that when I read several accounts of the Armada several years also that the figures for the amount of cannon that the Spanish fleet varied wildly.  I remember reading that one detailed study carried out in the 1960s has since been largely discredited.  The number of guns carried also takes no account that the English guns were mounted on four wheeled carriages while the Spanish guns were mounted on two wheel carriages more suitable for land warfare.  This made the Spanish guns very difficult to reload at sea and the rate of fire of the English ships, although slow in comparison with what the English Navy was later to achieve, was far superior to that achieved by the Spanish"

Tim, what you say is all in the links that I provided...

"I would add that I doubt that Philip realistically expected to conquer England.  This was not 1066 and look how long the reconquest of the Netherlands was taking.  More likely he hoped to occupy London and then force Elizabeth to make a peace by which she removed her army from the Netherlands and stopped supporting the rebels and grant tolerance to English Catholics."

Tim where do you find the support for this theory?
Did some research and came on the following:
http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/130


Kind regards, Paul.

Paul :
Any idea if he covers the other, later Armadas? There were 2 later attempts (1596 & 1597), foiled mostly by the weather. The 1601 effort did effect a landing in Ireland, and held Kinsale for a time, but poor co-ordination with local forces led to the English victory in the battle of Kinsale, and the Spanish then accepted terms and returned to Spain.
(edited and expanded)

Tim of Aclea wrote:

I would add that I doubt that Philip realistically expected to conquer England.  This was not 1066 and look how long the reconquest of the Netherlands was taking.  More likely he hoped to occupy London and then force Elizabeth to make a peace by which she removed her army from the Netherlands and stopped supporting the rebels and grant tolerance to English Catholics.

I agree. Philip II may have had an over-inflated sense of his own organisational abilities and a tendency to try and micro-manage everything, but he wasn’t naïve. As you say, he was already having enough trouble subduing the rebellious Dutch, in a province of which he was the legitimate sovereign, and with a sizeable army already in place in a province that was considerably smaller than England. Indeed the whole point of his "Enterprise of England" was to get Elizabeth to stop supporting the Dutch so he could properly consolidate the Netherlands into the Spanish Empire.

Beyond getting Elizabeth to stop helping the rebels in the Netherlands; to stop the English intercepting Spanish trade and bullion shipments from the New World; and to demand she treat her Catholics more leniently, Philip likely had no other objectives. He certainly cannot have had any plans to replace Elizabeth. There was no other 'English' Catholic claimant with sufficient legitimacy to take the throne after Mary Queen of Scots had been executed the year before, and I doubt there were any other Catholic nobles who would have been sufficiently acceptable to the English establishment.

I can’t find the reference, but as I recall from when I started this thread, the military instructions given to Sidonia were for him to land at Gravesend on the south side of the Thames, (Elizabeth’s faulty intelligence had led her to assemble the main English forces at Tilbury on the other side of the river) and from this landing to proceed directly along the south side of the Thames to Lambeth, there to cross the river and occupy London, and hopefully get hold of the Treasury. This was anticipated to take no more than a week, and beyond that I don’t think there were any detailed plans for wider military action since presumably the emphasis would by then have shifted to diplomacy, provided everything had gone more or less to plan.

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Paul :
Any idea if he covers the other, later Armadas? There were 2 later attempts (1596 & 1597), foiled mostly by the weather. The 1601 effort did effect a landing in Ireland, and held Kinsale for a time, but poor co-ordination with local forces led to the English victory in the battle of Kinsale, and the Spanish then accepted terms and returned to Spain.
(edited and expanded)

Gil, as I understand it in your sentence "Any idea if he covers the other, later Armadas?" "he" is then Tim?
And yes yu can be right if you read the wiki about the siege of Kinsale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kinsale

Kind regards, Paul.

Meles meles,

did some further research on the web and found this:
"Did Spain want to conquer England?
It is fairly certain that Spanish king Philip II did not want or intend to rule England as part of the Spanish empire - or to make English people speak Spanish. As a zealous Catholic, his deepest wish was to return England to the "true church", to restore Church lands and property stolen by Henry VIII, reopen the monasteries, and restore Catholic forms of worship. The Pope had agreed to support an invasion. He excommunicated the English Queen Elizabeth, absolved her subjects from any duty to obey her, and offered financial help and papal blessing for an invasion. Philip, subject to the Pope's approval, would choose a new ruler pledged to restore the Catholic faith.

Queen Elizabeth - the object of the Armada was to replace this Protestant monarch - ally of so many of Philip's enemies in flanders and France - with a friendly catholic ruler.

Put a Catholic on the English throne The new ruler might have been Mary Stuart, "Queen of Scots" - a Catholic brought up in France - but in 1587 Elizabeth had Mary beheaded, after she had been involved in a series of Catholic plots to assassinate Elizabeth. A victorious Philip would not impose many other conditions: he wanted English soldiers withdrawn from the Spanish Netherlands, especially the English garrison at Flushing which blockaded the recaptured key port of Antwerp - at this stage, English help was perhaps the only thing stopping the complete collapse of the revolt by the Protestant Dutch. Philip also wanted to stop the attacks of English "pirates" like Sir Francis Drake on Spanish treasure ships and trade in the Caribbean and round the world.

Restore the Church Immediately after a successful invasion, Cardinal William Allen, the English Cardinal-in-exile and head of the English College in Douai, would take over the temporary administration of England, and work with English Catholics to restore the Catholic Church. The plan did not depend on English Catholics rising up to revolt, though it was expected that they would eagerly cooperate once it succeeded. If the English were not decisively beaten, Philip's instructions were that Spanish negotiators should at least try to secure toleration of Catholics in England before retreating.

From:
http://www.theotherside.co.uk/tm-heritage/background/span-armada.htm
From the "other side" (perhaps not that historically supported?) http://www.theotherside.co.uk/


But here perhaps a more educated link:
https://goo.gl/T4Q6Zi
Read page 92 and it gives indeed your views.
http://www.amazon.com/Politicians-Virtuosi-Essays-Modern-History/dp/0907628656


Kind regards, Paul.

PaulRyckier wrote:

Gilgamesh of Uruk wrote:

Paul :
Any idea if he covers the other, later Armadas? There were 2 later attempts (1596 & 1597), foiled mostly by the weather. The 1601 effort did effect a landing in Ireland, and held Kinsale for a time, but poor co-ordination with local forces led to the English victory in the battle of Kinsale, and the Spanish then accepted terms and returned to Spain.
(edited and expanded)

Gil, as I understand it in your sentence "Any idea if he covers the other, later Armadas?" "he" is then Tim?
And yes yu can be right if you read the wiki about the siege of Kinsale:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Kinsale

Kind regards, Paul.

Sorry not to have been clearer, Paul. I was referring to the link you posted - not yet had time to follow it to its conclusion.

sorry Paul for the late reply.  Many of the reasons why I do not think Philip expected to conquer England have been given notably the lack of a suitable candidate, the next in line was James VI of Scotland - a Protestant - and the very slow progress of the reconquest of the Netherlands.  I would also add the xenophobia of the English, I doubt if most English Catholics would have happily accepted a Spanish imposed monarch, and the number of towns, cities and fortifications that the Spanish army would have had to taken.  If one goes forward to the civil war - many towns and cities endured long sieges and even a fortified house such as Basing House held out against more than one siege and there were several castles that took some time to take.  I question how long that Palma could have afforded to be tied down in England without losing ground in the Netherlands.

Anyway, despite Sidonia having pretty successfully sailed the fleet right along the English Channel with minimal loss, there was no army in a position in Flanders to cross to England.  The Armada did not even come close to success.

A couple of other comments.  I would agree that if the original plan of Santa Cruz had been implemented it would have succeeded in landing a Spanish army in England, however, it was on an unrealistic scale.  A more modern equivalent would have been Montgomery demanding that the Normandy landing should consist of the landing of 10 divisions on day 1 backed up by 5 airborne divisions. 

The Spanish landing at Kinsale was mentioned in one post.  When the Spanish commander agreed to evacuate Kinsale following the defeat of the Irish army he declared that when Satan showed Jesus all the kingdoms of the world during the Temptation that he kept back Ireland as being only fit for him.  Knowing Nordmann's views of Jesus, a decision by Satan that I am sure he would have applauded.

regards

Tim

Tim again you can be right.

From the book that I mentioned from H.G. Koenigsberger
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helmut_Koenigsberger
I mentioned page 92...from the end of the page:
"In fact, the invasion of England by the duke of Parma's armies was only one of a number of possible aims of the armada campaign which Philip had in mind. It would have served his purpose if the mere presence of the armada in the English Channel, the threat of invasion, had relieved Portugal, the Azores and the Spanish-American shipping routes from the constant threat of Drake's raids, and if it had induced Elisabeth to treat for peace on the basis of withdrawing her help to the Dutch rebels"
And with the footnote 57 this text refers to a note from:
I.A.A. Thompson: "The Appointment of the Duke of Medina Sidonia to het Command of the Spanish Armada"

Kind regards, Paul.