The Spanish Armada

It is curious that Gardiner disposes of the proposed Spanish invasion of England—the dispatch of the Armada—in a slender paragraph.

True, the Spanish attack was poorly planned, weakly co-ordinated, long anticipated, and extremely unlucky. But it is still a grand story. Gardiner admits that the prospects of an invasion were terrifying to the English. A ballad of the time began

From merciless invaders, from wicked men's device,
O God, arise and help us to quell our enemies!

Gardiner emphasizes the polarization that Spanish hostility cemented in England. The majority Protestants found in their religion a political ground more powerful than the philosophical and doctrinal differences they recognized with the Roman church. The polarization was strong and long lasting. It was possible 300 years later for an English clergyman to slaver at the mouth over the threatened religious invasion.

There is one result of the English victory that is perhaps so obvious that it has gradually been forgotten: the effect it had on English nationalism. Englishmen could feel that they were not only just the match, but the superior of men from anywhere in Christendom. Forget the Spanish grandee: the English gentleman drank his beer while the Spaniard drowned in the North Sea. As Gardiner says, the disintegration of the Armada instilled in the English the illusion of discipline, an illusion that both fed and fed on the discipline inherent in Calvinist theology. At the bottom of page 17, Gardiner sums it up with this observation:

Anchored on the Rock of Ages, they could safely bid defiance to all the menaces of the Pope and to all the armies of the mightiest potentates of Europe.

We'll pick it up next time on page 18.