Talk:Spanish Armada

UPDATE
This article needs an update and I have made some modifications reflecting recent neutral historians views not the traditional English tale about any victory on the Spanish Armada. I have referenced my modifications and additions.--PLUS ULTRA CARLOS (talk) 02:03, 8 November 2020 (UTC)


 * The failure of the Armada to achieve any of its goals was because the English fleet prevented Parma’s crossing and any ships from landing. So, in that sense, it was an English victory. However, the Spanish fleet wasn’t beaten, hence, it was not a defeat.
 * I have expanded the article and added numerous references and sources so as to present a more accurate and balanced telling of the event. Much of what I revised rightfully challenges the myriad of long cherished notions perpetuated by the English to shore up their national pride and keep the “Black Legend” alive for centuries. It’s disappointing that, to this day, Anglophones, especially the English, continue to suppress or outright ignore facts extracted from data which has been mined from original documents preserved in the National Archives of Spain. After all, when it comes to details regarding ships and personnel, where else could accurate information be found other than the place whence the Armada originated?
 * It is my sincere hope that enthusiastic English editors will conscientiously exercise academic integrity and not blindly engage in "undo" campaigns so as to restore all the distorted rhetoric. I invite them to, instead, engage in collaborative discussion here in the "talk" page in order to come to an agreeable consensus. Pha13753 (talk) 23:30, 31 October 2022 (UTC)
 * It is a welcome addition as long as figures are not over inflated. The problem is your style of editing. There are a few sentences that don't belong in wiki, for one criticising historians is one (peer reviewed too) because they are English even though they are peer reviewed - Hanson, Parker, Hutchinson, Martin, Mattingly et al. The style is also out of place, examples: bear in mind that, Remember also that etc. There are some sentences that need rewording -The number of souls lost was extracted, sounds like something from a horror novel; it was Halloween the other night! Your recent edit has a lot of repetition in the article I will look to remove/condense these over the next day or two. Eastfarthingan (talk) 23:20, 1 November 2022 (UTC)
 * The Defeat or Failure section needs either removing or condensing within the article:

1 much is a repeat of what is already said in the article 2 'David v Goliath' view is distorted. Spain was the dominant world power with an empire, which England certainly was not. England had to make sure it didn’t lose the fight; they succeeded and this is all that needs to be said. Eastfarthingan (talk) 10:46, 3 November 2022 (UTC)

Return to Spain - Date that Howard halted pursuit?
Fourth sentence of this section begins, "On 2 August, Howard...." This makes no sense if the Battle of Gravelines was on 8 August. Should this instead read 12 August or 22 August--i.e., was the first digit of the date dropped? Spartan26 (talk) 19:09, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I'd say it was a mistype, I've corrected it for the 12th as this would ale the timeline more accurate. Eastfarthingan (talk) 21:55, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * If the battle occurred on 8th August on the Gregorian calendar, Howard could have called off on 2 August Julian (which Howard was using), or the 12th on the calendar Spain was using. Fiddlersmouth (talk) 22:53, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

Calendar
There is a potential minefield in this article in the calendrical dates. The English were still using the Julian calendar, 10 days behind the Spanish Gregorian. This may be the source of the dating discrepancy spotted above. It would be helpful to indicate which dates are which, and/or which calendar the article is using. Fiddlersmouth (talk) 22:49, 30 April 2022 (UTC)

I remember that Mattingley, in his book on the Armada, discusses this issue at the start, and decided to use Gregorian, since it corresponds to the calendar now in use, and at some times in the year 10 days can make a difference to the weather and the amount of daylight. PatGallacher (talk) 12:59, 21 May 2024 (UTC)

Article Split to Battle of Gravelines
Not sure why you have tagged this article for a split, why not be WP:BOLD and edit the content into the dedirect page? Norfolkbigfish (talk) 12:42, 12 August 2022 (UTC)

The actual number of Spanish Armada ships that left, were lost, and came home.
On the basis of the propaganda campaign that had already started at the time of the conflict and the well-worn notions repeated in so many books, articles, documentaries and films, especially in the last two hundred years, English historiography has reinforced a distorted view of what actually took place in 1588 and the circumstances that surrounded. Different clichés have been coined to explain the “defeat of the Invincible Armada”. One being a lack of a Spanish naval policy despite Spain having forged the first global empire and creating several fleets, with many ships built for both war and trade. The English learned to sail the oceans, to some extent, by emulating the Spanish and reading Spanish books (such as Breve compendio de la esfera y del arte de navegar by Martín Cortés in 1551 which had nine English editions) written on the art of sailing. After the Magellan-Elcano expedition returned in 1522, it was 55 years before Drake made his circumnavigation voyage using Spanish maps.

There continues to be no hesitation in using historical misrepresentations to this day, specifically around the number of lost ships. In 1988, José Luis Casado Soto (Los barcos españoles del sigly XVI y la Gran Armada de 1588, Madrid, 1988), no doubt amazed at the inaccuracy and persistence of these errors, examined the fate of each ship, based on the records of the Spanish Armada and the management of later fleets, which provide precise data; there were twenty-eight shipwrecks in Scottish and Irish waters and the total losses were no more than thirty-five ships. Most of these were urcas, transport and Mediterranean vessels. Only one single galleon, the San Marcos of Portugal, was wrecked on the return trip, which is of greatest significance considering that they were the ships that did the fighting.

The reason distortions are still perpetuated is a tendency to impose the present onto the past or, to put it more precisely, to view earlier events in the light of much later ones. In this sense, there are paradigms that serve to define European historiography of the last two centuries. One of them is the basis of the Black Legend which consists of ignoring or dismissing all things Hispanic. Accordingly, books dealing with the period of Spanish dominance should be read bearing in mind the effect on such books of the historical reality of the time when they were written. We should not underestimate the influence of “presentism”, the view of historiography as a phenomenon always rooted in the present of the historian. This presentism has generated a body of well-worn expressions that have been very hard to demolish. Although we are aware of those authors who distort the most, we rely on others to demolish them, but this paradoxically results in their consolidation. Dealing with such an inherited mixture requires a keen critical approach if the effects of “historical presentism” are to be avoided.

In other words, historiography is not only the historical product of a particular society at a given moment in time, but this move from a particular present towards a presumed past is also subject to the intervention of other previous “presents”. John Barrow, author of Memoirs of the Naval Worthies of Queen Elizabeth’s Reign, 1845, and other authors who created the contemporary myth of the “Invincible” Armada were conditioned by the England of their time: a society in a position of hegemony that was searching for its legendary origins, those heroic times to which its worthy lineage can be traced. For Victorian England, and for the England of previous decades, the sea was the stage where the nation’s virtues, power and wealth were located. There was a massive program of shipbuilding for war and trade. This was not surprising, since everything in England goes back to the sea, and its maritime presence has always determined its place as a nation among nations. Its careful focus on remaining superior to its competitors in this field has been quite apparent. The creators of England’s imperial age, from that particular present, constructed the seafaring picture of sixteenth-century England. The resulting consumer product, aimed at a specific nineteenth-century society, was updated for the benefit of the West in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Historian Arnold Trynbee pointed out the nationalistic nature of historiography which he easily detected in the English-language historiography of his time. This is not in any way to support the oversimplification that such nationalistic influence is specific to Anglo-Saxon countries. It happens to be the case, however, that in the last two centuries, English-speaking culture, and not just in Europe, has become overwhelmingly predominant to the point of hegemony, and this has a correlate in the power of its historiography. Therefore, it is not so much a question of a supposed nationalistic specificity in anglophone historiography, but simply a case of its overwhelming success.

Elizabeth, ruling and overseeing a poor island nation, had a laissez-faire relationship with seafarers; as long as the latter organized maritime ventures and added to the crown’s coffers, the queen, more or less, looked the other way. Allied to this special relationship is the particular nature of English documentation. The information about marine activities is written without any of the concerns of the accountant checking the accounts for the manager of a capitalist monopoly, in order to inform him of every penny spent, the occupation of every man employed and every occurrence. Quite the opposite: the aim was to deceive the crown, if possible, as to the value of goods seized, including those instances when knowledge of them would be detrimental to the purse, reputation or liberty of the person concerned to return to the sea when he wished to do so. Thus, the nature of this English documentation is self-congratulatory, self-exonerating, fictitious and full of praise for England, the crown, and the leaders of each voyage. It is not serious in relation to the actual events, and is emotionally exciting and delightful in the way it is written. It is this set of circumstances that affect the nature of English documentation, and therefore, inextricably, of its historiography – a certain amount of nationalistic specificity all its own that has to be taken into account when analyzing the causes and effects of historical presentism.

In stark contrast we have the Spain of Philip II. Here was a king burdened by the task of organizing the first political structure in human history that spanned several continents. To manage the information received and sent daily from the capital of the Empire, Philip created a huge bureaucratic machine and became one of the greatest readers of documents in history. This is the context, so completely different from the English case, in which Spanish documentation must be considered. Reports aim to be accurate, detailed and descriptive; they are written with the intention of conveying precise information by each person depending on their specific responsibility, so that the King or those to whom he has delegated his power may have all the information they need on which to base their orders. It was a pyramidal structure in which there was no motive, place or opportunity for deception or distortion, since the many reports sent to the Court would make such behavior easily detectable. The primary purpose of Spanish documentation is the conveying of information and any other aim is secondary. Consequently, what it gains in reliability as a source for the understanding of an actual event it loses in vividness and readability.

These considerations are not enough to explain the unequal historiographical treatment of the Spanish Armada, it’s important to bear in mind the differing historical development of England and Spain during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This was the period when Great Britain’s power and influence reached its zenith. As a result, its historiography has established a number of well-worn notions regarding modern European history. At the opposite pole, nineteenth-century Spain was a society in a state of obvious decline. Through military actions, the unyielding determination of the people had to compensate for the collapse and weakness of the State. Spain and the Hispanic presence in the world would survive these painful challenges, but finding themselves cast out of the mainstream of history and powerless to undertake any great endeavors, they faced a very long period of convalescence. Such was the nineteenth-century for Spain. The country awoke from its slumber in 1898, when it lost the remains of its empire and was cast out of its bed of delusions to face the reality of a new period of destitution. In the twentieth century, its symptoms erupted into the worst of all wars.

Unlike English society during the last two centuries, Spain did not experience the need, the self-satisfaction, to look back to an idealized past as the cradle of its virtues of which it could feel proud. But when it did, it found that her greatness has been buried by foreign historiography of the last two centuries. The reason is not any gratuitous ill will, but simply the need to give a degree of luster to the historical image of the mainly English-speaking countries who have produced much of this historical writing. Thus we have a radical asymmetry between English-speaking and Spanish societies during the last two centuries, which have been the best in the history of the former and the worst for the latter. The projection of this asymmetry into the field of historiography has produced an asymmetric discourse and this in turn has given us a flagrant distortion of historical facts. The historian who sets out to study sixteenth-century Spain from his twenty-first-century present inevitably stumbles across nineteenth-century England and its consequences. Presentism thus acquires its full historical burden: the historiography is not only a bipolar entity that, positioned in the present, looks towards a past that an earlier bibliography, previous presents, societies and moments whose study was not intended, and which may actually hinder the study of the period in question.

Hence a distorted picture has been constructed on the basis of the idealization of the failure of the Spanish Armada and the total concealment or ignorance of the later developments of the war. According to this picture, the failure of the Spanish Armada marked the end of Spain’s presence in the Atlantic and the beginning of its decline, together with the rise of England as a power. In other words, the replacement of the old Spanish Empire by the new British Empire. This is clearly nonsense, since it would be centuries before the British Empire reached its height. The perpetuation of such nonsense meant ignoring the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and even part of the nineteenth, removing that whole part of the historical process, performing a Victorian “British ellipsis” and picking up the story once more from the Battle of Trafalgar.

This distorted image has found expression in a number of historiographical clichés, or “erudite syntheses” of “conventional” (or “Great”) history. Their impact and validity can be seen by how often they are referred to in order to establish the importance of specific events. The reification of erudite syntheses, the uncritical validation of them as references by which to assess new research findings, undermines the most valuable significance of research itself. These syntheses of “great history”, as basic structures that link the products of historical knowledge, would play a role similar to that reserved by Thomas Kuhn for “paradigms”. Paradigms are coherent sets of knowledge and values of a given age that inhibit the development of learning. Geocentrism, the notion that God created a world consisting of a motionless Earth with celestial bodies revolving around it, and in which Man was the center of Creation, was a damaging impediment to the development of cosmology, until the facts accumulated against it became so overwhelming that it came crashing down and created the Copernican revolution. This concept can also be applied in a more restricted fashion to the history of Spain. Weighing upon it is a paradigm of denial, and as long as we validate this paradigm as a reference for assessing new or forgotten historiographical findings, we will be unable to evaluate their true meaning. Take for instance how in 2011 Neil Hanson simply parroted what Garrett Mattingly wrote in 1959, likewise in 2013 Robert Hutchinson recycled the erroneous information written by D. M. Waters in 1949, despite accurate information being available since 1988.

Inevitably, a new current of opinion and new avenues of research open up in search of historical truth. There are many ethical British and American historians who have chosen to aim for objectivity in their research rather than defend biased stereotypes that flatter their self-image as a nation. Martin A. S. Hume was probably the first with his work The Year after the Armada, published in London in 1896, during the heyday of the British Empire. Hume took issue with a number of well-established notions, such as the view that the Spanish Armada was an unjustified Spanish act of aggression – or justified only on religious grounds – by stating that the Spanish fleet was aimed at “the Heretic Queen and her pirate countrymen, who for years had plundered and insulted with impunity the most powerful sovereign in Europe”. He later continues with gentle irony that “Englishmen, then and now, had the comfortable and highly commendable faculty of believing their own side always to be in the right.” It is not the intention here to put forward a moral disquisition on the past, but to establish the real lines of causality in the recounting of history.

I propose we be the ones to “demolish” the presentism paradigms rather than wait for others to do it, starting with the subject of the number of ships that participated, left Coruña, lost and returned. Pha13753 (talk) 21:22, 8 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't see what the issue is here - the number of ships lost was around 44 - even J. Casado Soto makes this assumption 8 ships unknown, 3 damaged, 5 lost in combat, 28 lost to weather and 5 abandoned before the action. One also has too look at the numbers here for a detailed look. Eastfarthingan (talk) 15:41, 11 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I don't honestly see what it is you're complaining about. Of course everyone is going to believe their side is in the right, and a lot of what you're saying here looks a bit bloated, essentially insisting that the Spanish were entirely in the right for their aggression, and that the English inflated the defeat struck against the Spanish. I don't see how one can claim that without examining the counter argument that Spain may have done the opposite to attempt to lessen its embarassment at being given a bloody nose by a 'poor' and Heretical little island.
 * In fact this is just a huge chunk of text to say you think less ships were lost than the English claim, and that you think they did it on purpose even if it was wrong. That is astonishing bad faith. In regards to it being part of the English national mythos, so what? El Cid is part of Spains; people latch on to impressive victories won against large powers who try to invade, and it sounds almost like you're justifying Phillip's actions just because he had a bit of treasure stolen. Alooulla (talk) 02:45, 11 January 2023 (UTC)
 * One might add that the historian Geoffrey Parker in his biography of Philip II noted that the plundering and insults that Hume describes were the direct consequence of Philip II supporting the Ridolfi Plot of 1571 to overthrow Elizabeth I. (Drake’s first pirating voyage was in 1572). Even Philip II’s chief general the Duke of Alba said that the English were justified in opposing the Spanish. Locksley42 (talk) 23:26, 20 January 2023 (UTC)

Alooulla (talk) and Locksley42, note that this article has over the years been targeted by the massive network of Spanish suprematist socks led by User:JamesOredan (latest we found was User:Venezia Friulano). The argument here seems to be that "Spain was not really defeated, it was just the bad weather, it's British propaganda etc etc". I'm trying to restore this article and the others as they were but it gets confusing. The historiography section surely looks weird and is very very suspicious, with weird language. For now I'm introducing a more neutral intro, I don't know if the rest of the article has been poisoned as well. Barjimoa (talk) 22:48, 18 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I think it might be worth amending the causes section, as it says that it was alleged that Philip II supported plots to overthrow Elizabeth I. Geoffrey Parker’s books have made it pretty clear that Philip II was fully involved in the Ridolfi Plot of 1571. (For that matter the Enterprise of England was first proposed then and not in 1583 as the article says.) Locksley42 (talk) 00:41, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Kinsale a Spanish Armada?
Dear @Eastfarthingan, Could you provide a reference to support that Kinsale 1601 was considered a Spanish Armada? Your cite “Graham 1978, pp 258-61” lacks a reference to verify it. Giralda.Avenida (talk) 12:58, 6 September 2023 (UTC)


 * Graham 1978 appears to have been a typo, as Graham 1972 was setup in the previous edit. No opinion on the content dispute, just passing through while fixing the error. -- LCU ActivelyDisinterested ∆transmissions∆ °co-ords° 14:09, 6 September 2023 (UTC)
 * Certainly - if the book named 'Spanish Armadas' has a chapter (pages 258 - 265) on the Armada to Ireland in 1601, then surely that warrants enough detail. In addition there is 'The Last Armada: Siege of 100 Days: Kinsale 1601' by Des Ekin. Eastfarthingan (talk) 14:24, 6 September 2023 (UTC)