The Super Summary of World History - Alan Dale Daniel [95]
King Phillip constructed the Spanish Armada, a fleet consisting of numerous exceptionally outsized ships, to invade England. King Phillip planned to sail his fleet to Holland, load his waiting infantry aboard the massive ships, and thence sail to England and debark for conquest. Realizing he needed a lot of men to invade England, the Spanish king thought many large ships were necessary to haul the men and equipment. Phillip may have been right about the need for large ships, but did all of them have to be so large? Believing the Catholic God was on his side, King Phillip put the Armada to sea in 1588 with orders to sail for Holland.
Figure 31 Route of the Spanish Armada
Things immediately began to go wrong for the Armada. Many of the ships were not seaworthy, and the men had little training in sailing, firing cannons, or otherwise surviving at sea. When the Armada appeared on the British horizon the English sea dogs set out in their small, but very maneuverable, ships to meet the challenge. Elizabeth was ashore with her army, all decked out in gleaming armor and ready to fight, but armies were unnecessary in this battle. The highly experienced English seamen vigorously attacked the Armada, but the grand ships sailed on with little noticeable damage. The Armanda successfully sailed to Holland, but unfortunately for the Spanish the troops were not ready to board. Somehow, no one informed them when the Armada would arrive. Seeing this was a mess, the Spanish dropped anchor, waiting for the morrow while trying to figure out what to do.
The English had other plans. Seeing the Spanish at anchor, the English unleashed several fire ships, burning from stem to stern, at the stationary Spanish Galleons when the wind was right. The fire ships caused a general Spanish panic, and a few of their ships were lost, but mainly the Spanish were unnerved. With things deteriorating and no troops appearing for the invasion, the Spanish admiral made a bad decision. He decided to return to Spain, but not down the channel—the way they came—but around Scotland and Ireland, and then back to Spain. The Spanish sailed north to their doom. On the way home tremendous storms struck the Armada tearing the vessels apart. The ships were not all that seaworthy anyway, and the massive storms simply gave them no chance. Nearly the entire Armada was lost at sea or driven onto the rocky Irish coast where plundering and murder awaited the warships and men courtesy of the area’s unruly inhabitants.
The loss of the Armada, by whatever means, was a huge blow to the Spanish war effort. Building the Armada drained the treasury, always bad news in a war, and the loss of men hurt as well. This began the loss of the worldwide Catholic empire. Meanwhile, England celebrated a miraculous victory. Elizabeth I became a legendary leader by way of the defeat of the Armada, and England would go on to secure its place as the world’s predominant sea power for 350 plus years (until the end of World War II in 1945). This was the start of the worldwide Protestant empire.
Europe Undergoes Vast Change
The Catholic Church was undergoing a new beginning because of groups like the Jesuit order founded in 1540 by Ignatius Loyola. This spawned the Counter-reformation against the Protestants. Eventually, the Council of Trent (1545 to 1563) managed to stop the worst church offenses. None of this prevented the two warring Christian sides from murdering one another in the name of God. The Thirty Years War (1618 to 1648) devastated huge tracts of Europe, and the English civil wars (1642 to 1649) managed to do the same in England. The