Free The Spanish Armada by Robert Hutchinson Page A

and Henri, Third Duke of Guise (cousin of Mary Queen of Scots) and the French ‘Catholic League’, promising support for the
Catholic cause in France.
    It was not only Drake’s predatory raids on the gold and silver extracted from the New World that incensed Philip; Elizabeth was now also overtly assisting the Protestant rebels in his
possessions in the Low Countries, believing it was better to fight the Spanish on someone else’s territory rather than on English soil. Her frontline against Spain would therefore be drawn in
the Spanish Netherlands. In August 1585, the queen had signed the Anglo-Dutch Treaty of Nonsuch, which committed her to assist the rebel Dutch provinces. As well as providing a generous annual
subsidy of 600,000 florins (£181,000,000 in current spending power), she later sent a seven-thousand-strong English army to the Low Countries under her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of
Leicester. Its operational costs were to be paid by the Dutch. Unfortunately they turned out to be less-than-prompt payers. Moreover, corruption and rampant fraud ensured that her soldiers remained
unpaid and sometimes starving. No wonder she exclaimed petulantly that her Dutch war was ‘a sieve, that spends as it receives, to little purpose’. 6
    Drake’s brief occupation of ports in Galicia in north-west Spainthe following October (when he gleefully sacked local churches) and his later raids on the Canary and
Cape Verde Islands and efficient burning and pillaging of Spanish towns in the Caribbean, sealed Philip’s determination to invade England. 7
    Never one to be dragooned into unconsidered action, he mulled over the problem carefully for nearly two months. That December, he invited his nephew Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma, the
successful general who had defeated the Dutch in Brabant and Flanders, to draw up plans for an expeditionary force to cross the narrow seas to invade England.
    Santa Cruz, his confidence buoyed by naval victories in the Azores, meanwhile boasted that he could easily defeat England at sea, if only Philip chose to give the order. He offered to
‘serve your majesty in the enterprise in the firm hope that . . . I will emerge just as victorious from it as in the other things I have done for you’. 8 It was probably to the admiral’s subsequent dismay that the king readily took him at his word. In January 1586 he was ordered to produce estimates of the extent of forces
necessary to successfully invade England and finally eradicate this Protestant bulwark that had become so troublesome to Spain’s interests and ambitions.
    Philip knew that to defeat England meant he had to destroy its navy to enable him to control the sea. Thirty years before, when he had been such an unenthusiastic husband to Elizabeth’s
half-sister, he had noted: ‘The kingdom of England is and must always remain strong at sea, since upon this the safety of the realm depends.’ 9 He was now destined to test the veracity of his maxim.
    The Spanish king was no warmonger, however. The exiled English priest Robert Persons acknowledged that Philip ‘fears war as a burned child dreads the fire’. 10 But that fear emanated from more prosaic issues rather than simple scruples over the shedding of Christian blood. Philip, always debt-ridden, was more worried about the
costs involved and the economic consequences of war.
    His very worst misgivings were realised when Santa Cruz submitted his ambitious estimates on 12 March 1586, asking for one hundred and fifty-six ships plus 55,000 troops to land in England,
supported by four hundred auxiliary vessels. Like any modern military planner he had built in extra contingencies in case his requirements for the invasion force were cut back, but he had carefully
workedout that such a military operation would cost an eye-watering four million ducats (about £3 billion at today’s prices). Philip probably gasped in pain when
he saw the row of noughts on the paper before him,