English Armada

The English Armada (a name suggested by Wes Ulm of Harvard University) was the episode in the Anglo-Spanish War of 1585–1604 that followed upon the defeat and dispersal of the Spanish Armada (1588). In this unsuccessful campaign, a massive English military expedition, led by Sir Francis Drake as admiral and Sir John Norreys in charge of the troops aboard, sailed against Spain in 1589. The venture has sometimes been called the Counter Armada or The Drake-Norris Expedition, 1589.

The aim was to capitalise upon Spain's temporary weakness at sea after the successful repulsion of the Spanish Armada, which lost over half its ships in a great storm on its return voyage. However most of the ships lost were armed merchantmen, while the core of the armada, the galleons of the Spanish navy's Atlantic fleet, survived the encounter with minimal losses and was put into Spain's Atlantic ports for a refit.

The English expedition had three goals: to burn the Spanish Atlantic fleet lying at port at La Coruña, San Sebastian and Santander along the north coast of Spain, to make a landing at Lisbon and raise a revolt there against Philip II to help the Portuguese win independence for the their country and empire (which included Brazil, and the East Indies, among others, and trading posts in India and China - the hope being that Portugal would be a useful ally) by helping a Portuguese pretender to take the Portuguese throne from the Spanish Habsburgs, and then to continue south and seize the treasure fleet as it returned from America to Cadiz.

Like its Spanish predecessor the English Armada suffered from overly optimistic planning, based on hopes of repeating Drake's successful raid on Cadiz in 1587. Perhaps a sense of divinely ordained purpose played no small part in this optimism as it had with the Spanish Armada. The multiple goals were in large part due to the need for private capital to help finance the project, for the expedition was financed as a joint venture, with the Queen being the prime investor. The result was a disastrous tension between the separate goals - each of which was ambitious in its own right.

Drake managed to destroy a few unimportant ships at La Coruña, but unforseen delays forced him to bypass Santander, where most of the Atlantic fleet was refitting, and head for Lisbon and his next objective.

The Portuguese candidate to supplant Philip II was Antonio, Prior of Crato, the last surviving heir of the House of Avis: not a charismatic figure, whose illegitimacy did not aid his cause, and who faced an opponent with perhaps the better claim, in the eyes of the Portuguese nobles of the Cortes, Catherine, Duchess of Braganza. The uprising was not forthcoming, but while the English fleet was at Lisbon, Drake took the opportunity on June 30 of seizing several shiploads of wheat bound for Spain, but which were being carried in German bottoms, an act that required a publicly-printed justification, a Declaration of Causes from the Queen's own printer. Without booty, the merchant partners who had contributed capital to float the joint venture faced considerable losses.

Eventually the expedition, having initially caught the Spanish authorities off guard, perhaps mainly by its sheer audacity, was militarily repelled, and suffered from disease and storms, with terrible losses, failing in all its goals. It helped further undermine the Elizabethan finances that had been so carefully restored during the long reign of Elizabeth I. The botched opportunity was to prove to be a decisive turning point in the war, against England, ending with the Treaty of London in 1604. Spain's rebuilt navy quickly recovered and exceeded its pre-Armada dominance of the sea until defeats by the Dutch fifty years later marked the beginning of its decline.

The most detailed account, written in the form of a letter by an anonymous participant (Anthony Wingfield), was published in 1589: A true Coppie of a Discourse written by a Gentleman, employed in the late Voyage of Spain and Portingale... which set out openly to restore the credit of the participants.

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