The
Spanish
fleet was
not the
last Armada sent
against England
On 23 July 1595, four Spanish galleys
sailed on a reconnaissance mission
from southern Brittany and landed at
Mousehole in Cornwall. The fishing village
was burned and three men killed. A small
force of Cornish militia fled in blind panic
at the first sight of the Spanish troops,
and Penzance was then bombarded, the
Spanish destroying houses and sinking
three ships in its harbour. Newlyn was also
burned. Fearing the imminent arrival of an
English fleet, the Spaniards departed on
4 August – but not before a Catholic Mass
was celebrated openly on English soil.
Two more fleets were despatched in 1596
and 1597, but these were also dispersed
by storms. A larger force of 3,000 Spanish
troops landed at Kinsale in south-west
Ireland in 1601 to assist Irish rebels, but
these troops were forced to surrender.
The 19-year Anglo-Spanish war ended
in 1604 at the behest of Elizabeth’s
successor, James VI and I, who was
determined to conclude the cripplingly
expensive hostilities. With the Treaty of
London, England ended its support of the
Dutch rebellion in the Spanish Netherlands,
and renounced English privateers’ attacks
on Spanish shipping. On Spain’s part, the
treaty acknowledged that official hopes
of restoring Catholicism to England were
over for ever.8
Elizabeth made her
famous “body of
a weak and feeble
woman” speech only
after the Armada had been
chased out of the channel
On 8 August, Elizabeth arrived at
Tilbury to encourage her forces,
famously declaring that “I know
I have the body of a weak and feeble
woman, but I have the heart and
stomach of a king – and of a King of
England too ... shortly we shall have
a famous victory over the enemies of
my God and of my kingdom”.
But though fears of an invasion
from Flanders lingered, the Armada
itself – which had already been
delayed by bad weather, and
which consisted in large part notof warships but scouting or supply
vessels – had been weakened
during fighting with English ships
at Gravelines, and had fled north
to Scottish waters before skirting
Ireland en route back to Spain.
In fact, rumours about the
planned invasion were just
Elizabethan propaganda, and –
with the cost of her forces in the likely
invasion areas of Kent and Essex
amounting to £783 14s 8d per day- the queen ordered an immediate
demobilisation of the army.
7
Robert Hutchinson is the author of The Spanish
Armada (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2013)Elizabeth delivers her
stirring speech to troops
at Tilbury, as imagined in
a 19th-century engravingSpanish ships
at Mousehole,
Cornwall, depicted
in a later illustrationGE
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