1588: the Spanish Armada Still Loses

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Welcome to 1588: The Spanish Armada Still Loses, brought to you by the History Department and the College of Arts and Sciences at The Ohio State University, and by the magazine "Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective. My name is Nick Breyfogle. I'm an associate professor of history and director of the Goldberg Center for Excellence in Teaching. And I'll be your host and moderator today. Welcome, everyone. And thank you for joining us. 

Today, we are privileged to welcome world renowned historian Geoffrey Parker, who will explore the history of the Spanish Armada. In July 1588, the Spanish Armada sailed from Corona to conquer England. Three weeks later, an English fire ship attack in the channel, and then a fierce naval battle foiled the planned invasion. Many myths still surround these events. The genius of Sir Francis, the genius of Sir Francis Drake is exalted while Spain's efforts are belittled. But what really happened during that fateful encounter? In a recent book, Parker draws on archives from around the world and deploys vital new evidence from armada shipwrecks off the coast of Ireland and Scotland. 

Today, he'll provide a fresh understanding of how the rival fleets came into being, how they looked, sounded and smelled. And what happened when they finally clashed. Looking beyond the events of 1588 to the complex politics which made the war between England and Spain inevitable, and at the geopolitical and dynastic aftermath. Parker will deconstruct the many legends to reveal why, ultimately, the bold Spanish mission failed. Let's take a moment to get to know our speaker. Geoffrey Parker taught at Cambridge and St. Andrews Universities in the United Kingdom, at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and at Illinois and Yale Universities in the United States, before becoming the Andreas Dorpalen professor of European history, the Ohio State University in 1997. He has directed 35 doctoral dissertations to completion, as well as publishing 40 books and over 100 articles in three particular areas. The first, military history, such as the field changing "The Military Revolution". 

Second, in global environmental history, such as the book "The Global Crisis: War, climate change, and catastrophe in the 17th century". And third, in early modern European history, books such as "Imprudent King: a new life of Philip II", and "Emperor: a new life of Charles V". His work has been translated into many languages, and in 2012, the Royal Dutch Academy awarded him the Heineken prize for history. Parker is a fellow of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Academy. And just this year, he was inducted into the American Philosophical Society, one of the highest recognitions for scholars in the United States. In February of 2023, Yale University Press published his latest book, "Armada: the Spanish enterprise and England's deliverance in 1588", which he co-authored with one of his formal doctoral advisees, Colin Martin. With that introduction, let me lay out the plan. Professor Parker will begin with a presentation on the Spanish Armada. Then he'll take your questions, and we'll open things up for discussion. If you're interested in asking a question, please write it in the q&a function, which you'll find at the bottom of your screen on Zoom, and then I'll read your questions to him. We'll do our best to answer as many questions as we can, and we received several questions in advance. 

We'd also like to take a moment to acknowledge that the land The Ohio State University occupies is the ancestral and contemporary territory of the Shawnee Potawatomi, Delaware, Miami, Peoria, Seneca, Wyandotte, Ojibwe, and Cherokee peoples. Specifically, the university resides on land ceded in the 1795 Treaty of Greenville, and the forced removal of tribes through the Indian Removal Act of 1830. We want to honor the resiliency of these tribal nations and recognize the historical context that have and continue to affect the indigenous peoples of this land. Now, without any further ado, let me pass you over to Professor Geoffrey Parker, who will take us on an exploration of "1588: the Spanish Armada still loses". Over to you, Professor Parker.

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Thank you very much, Nicholas, what a lovely introduction. I would like to underscore at the beginning that this is May the eighth, an important anniversary in Europe. In my country, it's known as Victory in Europe Day, because on the eighth of May 1945, World War Two in Europe ended. It's a public holiday in France. No surprise there, the French love holidays. May the first, International Labor Day, May 18, Ascension Day, May 29th, Pentecost and so on. But May the eighth is different. Never before or since World War II, have so many people died violent unnatural deaths in such a short space of time. So I'd like to begin by sparing a thought today for the millions of men, women and children, for whom Victory in Europe Day came too late. And now I'd like to transport you back not to 1588, not yet, but to 1985 when I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign for the first time to give a job talk. I chose to speak about my research with Colin Martin on the Spanish Armada, hoping that our combination of History and Archaeology would create a good impression. But at the end of my talk, a faculty member at the back raised his hand and said, "well, I listened carefully to watch you had" this is my Illinois accent "to what you had to say, but I couldn't detect anything really new". I pause for a moment to wonder, is that really a hostile question? Yep. And so I answered with a smile, "I guess you're right, the Spanish Armada still loses". The entire room erupted into laughter and applause, which puzzled me. Yes, it was a funny line, but not that funny. And I remained puzzled until the department chair explained to me that the same faculty member had asked that same question after every job talk, but I was apparently the first candidate to hit a return serve. Despite this cruel attempt to destroy my career at UIUC before it even started, I got the job. And in 1988, Colin Martin, and I brought out our book. It spent 14 weeks in the British bestseller charts, rising to number five. And then this year, we brought out a second edition. But don't get your hopes up. It may be 728 pages long, but the Spanish Armada still loses. Which prompts the question: why did two old guys like Colin Martin and me devote several years of our lives to doubling the size of our book if we couldn't change the outcome? The media we used, were just the same. We told our story using the same combination of images, artifacts, and documents. Here you see on the left an image, the ensign of one of the Portuguese galleons captured by the Dutch and displayed in triumph in a church in Leiden in the Netherlands. In the center, you see an artifact specially chosen for you rodent-ologists. It's a skull of a rat found on one of the excavated Armada racks. And on the right, a document, the last will of Don Antonio de Ulloa, a Spanish nobleman lynched after being shipwrecked and captured in Ireland. Just permit me to say a word or two about that. Here's his signature Don Antonio de Ulloa and it ends in mid sentence "el verdugo", the hangman, "no me da más lugar de": "the hangman won't leave me any more time to" and the guy's dragged off. And this little list here 1234, there's his name, Don Antonio de Ulloa, a list of 34 Spanish officers captured after they staggered ashore from their wrecked ships and hanged in Galway town on the ninth of October 1588. Now the will on the right comes from a Spanish archive. 

The list on the left comes from a British archive. Record linkage plays a crucial role in our story, both between public and private archives in eight different countries, and between history and underwater archaeology. Although the new edition of our book contains lots more images, there are now over 200 of them, and lots more text, 21 chapters instead of 14. Colin and I still address the same two simple questions as before. First, why did Philip II decide that the best way to conquer England and restore it to the Catholic faith was descend from Spain to Flanders? A fleet consisting of 130 ships, you see the totals here 130 ships, 27,305 men, 2431 big guns, and 123,780 artillery rounds for them. And then the second question: why did his plan fail so spectacularly, forcing his fleet, "Armada" in Spanish, to return to Spain by sailing North around Scotland and Ireland, a 5000 mile Odyssey that lasted at least two months, in which at least 35 ships and at least 10,000 men perished? Now the answer to the first question, why do it that way, is relatively simple. Phillip wanted his fleet to sail from Spain to Flanders, which is one of his possessions, and pick up there an army of 27,000 veteran troops who are awaiting precisely this. They are the invasion force, the Armada will escort them across to Margate in Kent, and from Margate, they will march on London, where they hope to catch a Queen Elizabeth and her ministers and kill them all. Philip expected the Royal Navy to try and prevent this. And so he packed each ship in the Armada with hundreds of soldiers. Remember, 27,305 men on just 130 ships. And he was confident that they would suffice to board and capture any adversary who got in their way. Notice that the soldiers are up here in what they call "the fighting tops" as well as lining the decks here just waiting for the chance to get at the English. This is the English. The grand strategy almost works. May I just refer you back to this engraving made by an English draftsman, Augustin Ryther, the Armada leaves Spain, as Nicholas just told you, on the 21st of July, 1588, it reached the channel just 10 days later, and despite every effort at interdiction by the Royal Navy, on the sixth of August, it dropped anchor of Calais, only 30 miles from Margate, and it waited there for 36 hours hoping to join up with the armada of Flanders, the army in Flanders. So why didn't that happen? This so-called Armada portrait of Queen Elizabeth, at least 10 copies made, three of them survive today. This portrait pinpoints two critical reasons for England's deliverance. In the left window, you can see an attack by eight fire ships. And this caused panic in the Armada anchored off Calais, which allowed the English warships to move in for the kill. In the right window, major storms off the coast of Scotland and Ireland destroyed one quarter of the Armada ships on their long way home, causing the death of 1/3 of the men aboard. The combined efforts of historians and underwater archaeologists since the 1960s has not changed the outcome shown here in probably 1590, but we have, I think, explained it better, and here's how. So far, eight of the 35 Armada shipwrecks have been excavated, at least in part, and I want to focus on just three of them: the Girona, a Galleass which goes down off County Antrim, La Trinidad Valencera, a merchant vessel from Venice, which goes down off County Donegal, and the Santa Maria De La Rosa, another merchantman, this time from San Sebastian in northern Spain, which goes down of County Kerry. In 1967, a Belgian professional diver, Robert Sténuit, worked out from documents that an armada ship had sunk close to an exposed fang of rock up here, not far from the Giants Causeway. Those of you who know Ulster will know the Giants Causeway. Well, not far to the west is this fang of rock called Lacada Point. When government cartographers mapped the area back in the 1830s, they recorded two traditions. English speaking residents in the area said the Spanish ship went down to the east. Excuse me, they said to the west of Lacada Point, whereas the Gaelic speakers said no, it went down to the east of Lacada Point. And the wreck lay undiscovered until 1967, because no one before Sténuit believed the Gaelic speakers.

 Perhaps they forgot that in 1588 there are no English speakers living in this area, so why would you believe them? On his first dive, Sténuit found a large artillery piece. Here it is, there's Sténuit bringing it up from the bed of the sea. Almost certainly Spanish, but what really clinched it was the 1000 gold and silver coins, the 12 gold rings, the six gold chains and the 35 other items of gold jewelry, which were unmistakably Spanish. So yes, he'd found a, an armada rack. But how did he know they came from the Girona? A galleyass built in Naples, propelled by a combination of oars and sails, he found, Sténuit found no fragments of the ship itself. And in any case, no ship in the 16th century carried a nameplate. The answer came with one of those 12 gold rings. This one, which said Madame de Champagney and the date MDXXIII, 1524. Now in 1524, Nicole Bonvalot, Madame de Champagney, gave birth to a son. And we know that his son, Thomas Perrenot, sailed with the Armada aboard the galley as Gerona, so finding his Granny's ring, identified the rack, only nine of the 1300 men aboard Gerona when it sank lift to tell the tale, and Thomas Perrineau was not among them. Nevertheless, we can reconstruct several aspects of the lives of the drowned man and of the abandon of the sunk ship from the artifacts left behind and excavated by Sténuit. This is the gun, that you saw a couple of moments ago, being excavated. All the artifacts are in, today in the Girona room in the Ulster Museum in Belfast and they were valued, when Sténuit reported them all, they were valued at 132,000 pounds, which today is a million dollars. That made him rich. It also encouraged others to look for Armada wrecks elsewhere. The following year 1968, a team of divers that included Colin Martin, later to be my co-author, decided to check out a local oral tradition that an armada ship called the Queen of the Rosary that sank in Blasket Sound in County Kerry, curiously it's the furthest west point of Europe. And the story was that a ship called the Queen of the Rosary had sunk right there. Almost immediately when they went down in 1968, the divers found the wreckage of a wooden ship. But was it an armada wreck? And if so, which one? Remember, ships in the 16th century don't have a nameplate but one of the humble artifacts that they found was a pewter plate crudely inscribed "matute". The embarkation lists for the fleet included just two men named Matute: Francisco de Matute, captain of a company of Spanish infantry and his brother Juan who served as his company Lieutenant. Both brothers sailed on the same ship, Santa Maria de la Rosa, a converted Merchantman, that sank with all hands, at least 300 men in Blasket Sound. So the divers had indeed found the ship, whose name was recalled for four centuries in oral tradition, the Queen of the Rosary, Santa Maria De La Rosa. And although they found little gold, they did recover a large number of unused artillery rounds, a curious circumstance to which I will return. Three years later, so we're now in 1971, the city of Derry sub aqua club in Northern Ireland located the rack of a large wooden ship in Kinnagoe Bay in County Donegal, which included a huge, excuse me, HUGE bronze siege gun cast for Philip II. Now, forgive me, but I need to just point out some features of this. First of all, 5186 that's the weight of this gun in pounds. Philipus Rex, the owner, Juanes Maricus a Lara, the guy who oversaw the casting in año 1556, 1556, the year it was made. So they found a large wooden ship carrying a bronze siege gun wearing, weighing 5186 pounds in Kinnagoe Bay, but it could have sunk at any time after 1556. Was it an armada rack? And if so, which one? Please remember, no ship in the 16th century bore a nameplate? Yes, I know I'm repeating myself, but it's what you'd expect of someone my age, and I do hate to disappoint. I found the identity of this wreck in a document in Simancas Castle, which since 1540 has housed the archives of Spain's central government. Philip II either hired or hijacked almost 100 merchant ships for the invasion of England in 1588. Each of them needed additional military equipment in preparation for the campaign and since each, every item was government issue, every item loaded had to be listed, ship by ship. Those lists are filed in Simancas in a series conveniently labeled "Armada de Inglaterra", the armada of England, and in the dossier compiled for the Venetian Merchantman Trinidad Valencera, I found a description of three huge siege guns. The first one matched exactly the details on the excavated gun. 

First of all, it was un cañón, yeah, check. It had Felipus, Felipus Rex, check. Juanes Manrique a Lara ano, año 1556, and its weight was 51 quintales, and 86 pounds - 5186 pounds. That suffice to identify the wreck because in the pre-industrial age, mass production was impossible, even with items meant to form a matching set, as with siege guns, each one would have had slightly different dimensions. Only one bronze siege gun cast by Manrique a Lara in 1556 would have weighed precisely 5186 pound. So this page of the dossier provided a definitive identity of the wreck. But linking history with archaeology brought an added bonus. As you see the next entries on this page are two more cannon, otra cañón, cañón. "Quepesa cinquenta y tres. Quinceles y dies y seis libras, otra cañón of the same foundation, arms and letters, which is 52 quintales and 60 pounds. So presumably, they both lay somewhere on the seabag of Kinnagoe Bay. I wrote an excited letter to Colin, the older members of my audience will remember writing letters. The following year, he and the city of Derry, Derry sub Aqua club went back and found them. Both of the guns, both with those details. And today you'll find these and all the other artifacts recovered from Trinidad Valencera in the tower Museum in Derry. And so to the quest, second and last question that Colin and I tried to answer in our book, why Philip II's grand strategy fail so spectacularly? We argue that the answer lies, at least in part, in significant differences in naval gunnery. And that's one reason why I've spent so much time thus far on big guns. We know that the Armada carry 2431 artillery pieces, but that total is misleading, because only 88 of them, only 88 of them were what we call big guns. Big Guns are more than 16 pounders, because only more than 16 pounders can inflict serious damage on the hull of a wooden ship. So 88 on the Spanish side, the English fleet carries at least 250 Big Guns, almost three times as many. Moreover, many of the armada's big guns were mounted on huge carriages like this one from the Trinidad Valancera, which extended for almost half the width of the gun deck. Its crew could load it, latch it to the side, and fire one round before boarding the enemy, but they had no easy way to reload it. In any case, they never imagined a second round would be necessary, it's fire and forget, you board the enemy ship immediately after firing your artillery, unless of course you were English. The English had developed different tactics. Their big guns, just the same size, rested on compact carriages with four small wheels, sometimes called trucks. This one comes from Mary Rose, an English warship that sank in 1545. And the truck carriage design brought two advantages. First, it made the big guns much easier to aim. Consider this picture from about 1518, in which all the guns are pointed forward, they're mounted on these little truck carriages and they're all being traversed to fire in the same direction. Second, the truck carriage makes it much easier to reload the gun and the surviving Spanish accounts of the Armada, and there are nearly 20 of them, nearly 20 Spanish participants wrote down what they had seen and heard, all of them agree that the English warships managed to fire their guns far more rapidly than the Spanish ships. In the words of the chief gunnery officer on the Spanish flagship, and I quote, "the English fired their cannon at the same speed that we fired our muskets". Colin and I attributed this to two developments, the superior compact design of English gun carriages and the superior design of English warships, which carried more sail and had a sleeker design and a lower silhouette than their adversaries so that they could fire their guns and then get away to reload before the enemy could board them. But our theory ran into a big problem. This is 1987. It did not convince Alan Herrera, the director of a three part BBC documentary, on which Colin and I served as historical consultants. At that time, the BBC commanded resources beyond the wildest dreams of mere academics, and Alan commissioned replicas of one of the gun carriages found on the Trinidad Valencera, and one of those found on the Mary Rose. And he, he then paid the Royal Navy to provide a field gun crew to conduct a comparative test. These six fit, highly motivated, superbly trained, and intensely competitive young men took just five minutes to load the Spanish gun rig, haul it into position, fire it and haul it in board for reloading, and Colin's heart and my heart just sank when they did it so quickly. But significantly, when they did the same thing with the English gun, the same gun mounted on an English style truck carriage, the operation required only four of them, and it took those four half the time to perform the same drill. So English artillery even under these peak conditions when the ship is not under fire, you have superbly trained man who are used to guns, even then it's twice as fast and it takes fewer men as well as less time. So Colin and I continue to argue that the Armada ships lack the equipment and the drills to reload their big guns rapidly, and that this explains why the Armada wrecks carried so much unused ammunition, and not just the wrecks, most of the Armada ships that returned to Spain. Remember, they were all issued with artillery rounds, all government issue, so when they came back, they had to return it. And they returned numerous unused artillery rounds and copious barrels of powder. Even the flagship, San Martin, which as one account said, "sail to wherever the fighting was hottest", which also sent munitions to other ships. It still returned to Spain with over 1200 unused artillery rounds, and three tons of unused powder. And the only plausible explanation for this pattern, which could be, which we did replicate for most, at least half of the amount of ships left records like this. 

The only plausible explanation is that the Spanish crews could not or would not reload their big guns in action. And this was certainly not the case with the English warships. All surviving Spanish sources reported both with the rapid fire of the English big guns, and the extensive hull damage inflicted. Damage so severe that 35 Armada ships would not make it back to Spain. But here's the final wrinkle, between 31st July when the Armada is of Plymouth and the sixth of August when it drops anchor off Calais, the English, the Royal Navy makes four attempts to break the armada's disciplined formation, and all four of them fail. The fleet, the Armada, reaches Calais almost intact, a very remarkable achievement. But once anchored off Calais, the Armada loses the strategic initiative. Phillip II's invasion strategy, you may remember, requires his ships from Spain to pick up his troops in Flanders and ferry them across to Margate on the Kent coast. But embarking the veteran troops took time and as the Armada waited, the English exploited the favorable wind and tides of the Narrow Sea to launch eight fire ships. Here they are, eight fire ships. Just a word about this, this is a brand new source. Probably none of you have seen it. It's one of 10 line and wash drawings of the Armada campaign, obviously done by a Dutch draftsman because the wind rose is in Dutch:  oost and suyt. It came on the market in 2020 and all 10 were purchased for the National Museum of the Royal Navy at Portsmouth for 600,000 pounds. The site of these eight fire ships, careering towards the Armada, sails aflame, guns exploding caused panic. The Spaniards therefore cut their cables, abandoned their arm, their anchors and made for the open sea. And in doing that they also abandoned their disciplined formation and allow the English to isolate individual ships and to use their big guns to inflict devastating damage. We know from some Spanish sources that on occasion 15 English warships surrounded a Spanish vessel and just went round and round bombarding it, basically bombarding it to death. This is one of the English ships as you see, it's just ready to go across the stern of the Spanish galleon and rake it with its artillery. And they could do that with little risk to themselves, both because the Armada ships found it so difficult to reload their big guns. And because they couldn't catch the English. The English ships were just faster. Note the sleek line and the low silhouette of the Armada ship. Excuse me, getting ahead of myself. That battle took place on the eighth of August 1588. The following day, the commanders of the battered Armada discussed at some length whether they should surrender to the English. And although they rejected that option, since they dared not face another day of combat with the English, they decided to return to Spain by sailing around Scotland and Ireland, going home the long way around. Many ships could not withstand the storms that struck them on the way. Partly because England's big guns had inflicted so much structural damage, and partly because they'd left their anchors off Calais. One of the great weaknesses of the ship is that the creator did not equip them with brakes. So the Spanish Armada still loses. But Colin and I hope that you've detected some things in our argument that eluded my interlocutor in Illinois and have seen some things that really are new. But if not, why not buy a copy of the book, and read chapter 16 entitled, "Anatomy of Failure"? Alternatively, I can answer your questions now. Thank you very much.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Thank you so much, Geoffrey. What an amazing and fascinating experience, and particularly the opportunity to work both on land and subaquatic to be able to get your sources from those different, those different locations. That's really quite remarkable. For those who are with us today, if you have questions for professer Parker, please jump in and type them into the q&a function, which is just in the bottom of your screen, you'll see some people have done so already. We had a couple of questions come in that I want to start with just from before when people register. One is actually not so much a question, but is a, just a hello, Jason Beavers writes to you to say, "I was a student in your class way back in the early 2000s in your reformation class", and he remembers that during the quarter in which he was in your class, there was a strike by the janitorial staff across campus. And so you apparently organized your class to meet off campus so it was not to have to cross the picket lines. And so he says a warm, passes on a warm welcome.

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Well, thank you. Thank you, Nicholas. Thank you, Jason. Yes, I remember you. And I remember that class. Being brought up in Britain being a pinko leftist socialist, I was not prepared to cross a picket line. Luckily, it was a class on the Reformation. So one member of the class had access to a church hall. So he suggested we could meet there. And we met there throughout the strike, never crossed the picket line. So, um, very proud of that. I think that's a lesson I would rather they learnt than learning the birth and death dates of even Martin Luther. Oh, I'm probably going to be struck down for that one, I'm sorry, Martin.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
I think you're 100% right when you say that, even courting the risk that you're courting. One question that we had come in is, why did so many and varied myths develop? How is it that the history of the arma-, I mean, how is the history of the Armada relevant today? And if it isn't too much of a stretch, our questioner asks, are there ways in which you can use this military history to develop insights about future conflicts, even the Russian war against Ukraine?

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Well, two halves to that. As I think the invasion of Ukraine is made mostly land and air, whereas the Armada is by sea, but it does come down in both cases to logistics. The problem in 1588 was you can send the 130 ships from Spain, 700 miles to the Netherlands, to Flanders, but they're sailing ships, and getting them all together, they're different, it's called the Spanish Armada but only perhaps 1/3 of the ships are actually Spanish. Phillip II requisition ships are all over the, shall we say, the Hispanic world, there's lots from the Mediterranean, there's a lot from the Baltic. And he puts them all together, so they move at different speeds, they have different sailing qualities. The remarkable thing is that their leader the Duke of Medina-Sidonia, a man who has never commanded ships at sea in action, manages to get them in 16 days, from Corunna, to Calais, it's an extraordinary achievement, and he doesn't lose a single ship, getting all of these vessels to sea. He loses three sailing ships before he gets to Calais. And that's really very extraordinary. But everything had to go right, you know? And there's, if you like a parallel with the invasion of Ukraine, for the very ambitious strategy, I mean, who knows what Putin really intended, but my guess is he intended a decapitation strike, capturing Kiev, and then he would get the whole of Ukraine. That's a very ambitious goal. Everything has to go right. And you remember part of the plan was for an airborne landing or a helicopter-borne landing on an airfield, and that fails. And when that fails, you're into an area which as you know, Nick, being a Russian historian, an area called, a period called the Rasputisa, which roughly translated is "the roadless period", everything gets, the snow melt turns all the, all the roads and all the tracks into bogs, and that's why they all get bogged down. You know, it could have been foreseen. But there's a failure of logistical planning there just as is failure of logistical planning. So you get your 130 ships from Spain to Calais, how do you tell the 27,000 troops in the Netherlands, "Okay, chaps, we're on our way. We're almost there. We're landing off Calais, we're there. Now, where are you?", and the answer is Medina-Sidonia sends a number of messages, but it takes time. And of course the English are in the channel ready to sink any vessel that comes through. So there's a failure of communication and on Phillip II's part, a failure to anticipate that this is going to be a problem. So I think there's a leadership problem. I think there's an overconfidence problem. At one point, Medina-Sidonia points out to Philip that sending a fleet in July is a bad idea because the weather, the winds often blow from England to Spain. And Phillip II replies, "in a cause like this, God will send good weather". And repeatedly he says, you know, if there's a problem, God will send a miracle. And seems that God is Protestant.

I can see the q&a mounting up, I can't read them, but I see that provoked I think.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
There are lots of questions for you. So let me ask this one. We have a couple of questions about, sort of, what happened to the men who were, who were wrecked on the kind of Armada shipwrecks? You know, did they survive? If they did survive, what happened to them? There seem to be rumors that perhaps they simply kind of wandered ashore and settled in Ireland. Is there any truth to that? Where did those rumors come from? Were many executed? Anyways, lots of questions about what happens to the men who are on the ships that, that sunk around the Scottish and Irish coasts?

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Students like to say, Nick, the answers are many and various. There's nearly 30,000 men aboard the 130 ships, so a number of them on there, and of course, they had no idea that they were setting sail for two months. They don't have enough provisions, and above all, they don't have enough water. So a number of them are going to die of starvation and thirst. We know that by, of the 30,000 as far as I can judge looking at all the sources I've seen, a roughly half of them do not see Christmas, 1588, they're dead before. Several of them get back to Spain and die almost immediately afterwards. It's rather like the liberation of the, of the camps in 1945, since 1945, is on my mind at the moment, a lot of prisoners were liberated but died almost immediately afterwards because their system has been subjected to such terrible privation. So a fair number of the thousands who die are just, either they die just after they get home or they die on board the ship. One of the ships that, there's actually five ships in Blasket Sound. I said the Trinidad Valancera which is the one that sinks, but there are others we know about it, because there are other ships there. And one of them says you know we're throwing about five man overboard every day. Because they're just dying of disease, hunger, they just can't stand the cold. Remember, this is getting onto September, October in Europe fairly northerly latitude, so natural causes. A number of them do survive, even though captured . Although I showed you a list of 34 Spanish prisoners of war who are all gentleman who are taken out and hanged, which is a particularly degrading punishment for gentleman. There are plenty more who are ransomed, after all you can get a lot of money for a Spanish gentleman, and most of those who are hanged, are hanged in the, in the very early days when the authorities, the English authorities in Ireland are terrified that this is a second fleet, that this is another fleet coming from Spain, and once these guys get ashore, they're all armed to the teeth, they're experienced soldiers, and there's a great, and I think reasonable fear, that if they get ashore, they recover and they form up into units, they're going to take over. So you have to kill them first. So there's a certain number who were just killed in cold blood. But I think the majority, and there are others who are ransom. So three categories already: there are those who die of natural causes, those who are executed, and those who survive and are ransomed. The fourth category are those who, of course, who just drowned trying to get ashore. There's some terrible, the English sources in Ireland all say we've never seen storms like this. There are terrible storms that strike the west of Ireland in September 1588, and a number of ships come on shore, and are basically pounded together by the waves. We've all probably been in the sea swimming, and got caught out by sudden rip tides, or heavy surf or whatever it may be. And the stories of of 1000 bodies at a place called Streedagh. If you've seen the film "Calgary", where they pace up and down the beach, that's Streedagh Strand, where 1200 Spanish bodies were laid out. the Girona, which I mentioned, which goes down 1300 men aboard, 9 of them survive. Of those 9, they take them down to the beach to see all the bodies lying on the surf, lying on the strand. And, you know, "who is that?",  "who is that?" They can't identify them, but there's an awful lot of bodies. So a lot of people down. Those, those are the four ways. I'm sure the myth your questioner refers to is the idea that all these people with dark hair and brown eyes in Ireland are descended from Armada survivors. So they come ashore, and are battered by the waves, but somehow they managed to reproduce. They are [unintelligible], you know, stereotypes are hard to defeat. No, I don't think so. There is a lot of fishing from Galicia, from the north coast of Spain, a lot of fishing boats go up to Ireland. And of course, you know, some of them winter there. And I suspect that's why. It's a much less romantic story, but a lot more plausible that the dark haired brown eyed Irish are in fact descended from fishermen who in the 16th, 15th, 14th century, and today, come up from Spain and fish off the Irish fishing banks. So I think that's where that myth comes from. There are one or two survivors who write, who get ashore, survive, and write accounts of how they walked all the way across Ireland, and survive, get to Scotland and get home again. But, you know, if there's, if there's 20 of those, I'd be surprised.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Wonderful, we have a lot of questions about some of the, just the logistics of various aspects of the, of the battle. Let me throw out a few of them. I won't give you all of them at once, but maybe three. So one is, one asked "why did the Armada sail north around Scotland and Ireland instead of the shorter route south?" Second asked "did the Dutch fleet play any role in this, in the fighting?" And then questions about the English. "So how did the English prepare for the attack? And were, in your estimation, English gunners actually better trained than the Spanish?"

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Three great questions. Why do they, the first one is easiest. Why do the, why does the Armada decide it has to go north? I mean, first of all, they discuss surrender. That was perhaps the most surprising fact that we found out this time it's not in the first edition of our book, but five different sources, people who'd been on the flagship all describe that there was a serious discussion about surrender because they're out, you know, they've been beaten, you know? They have just been thrashed by the English fleet. They cannot go back through the channel because they've just been thrashed. What they don't know is that the English have run out of shots. I mean, the English really do run out of shot. One of the English admirals, a guy you don't really hear about, William Winter, says you know, out of my ship, we fired 500 rounds today. I mean, that's a lot of shot. And, and he says, you know, and I've none left. So, so the English, you know, pretend they sort of come around the Spanish fleet, they sort of snap at its heels. So the Spaniards think that they're in for another thrashing if they tried to go south, but in fact, if they tried it on they would have been successful. We know they had plenty of ammunition. They don't know that the English don't, so that's the first answer. They have to go north because they believe that if they try going south, they'll have another day of catastrophically catastrophic losses at the hands of the superior English fleet. Second, what are the Dutch doing? Yes. The English asked that very question, you know, what are the Dutch doing? It's on one of the documents. Their Admiral is Justinus van Nassau, some of William of Orange, and Lord Burley writes on the account when he reads about what's going on. He said, "wherefore service, Justinus and his ships?" And the answer is they're playing a very important role. They are preventing the army in the Netherlands from getting out. The army in the Netherlands has little boats, barges, small boats, and the Dutch have blockade ships. So they're not involved in the big battle on the eighth of August, but they play a very important role in preventing the army and the Armada from linking together. Third question was, how come the English were better? There, it's a question of planning, and it really, you know, roles of the individual. The treasurer of the Navy, again, someone you don't, you know, the people you hear about are Sir Francis Drake, you know, our man Drake, and his head, his superior, the Lord Admiral Howard of Effingham, but the treasurer of the Navy is called John Hawkins. He's Drake's cousin. And he is involved in a very dangerous raid in 1568, so 20 years before the Armada. He's busy slave trading. Hawkins is in the news right now, because even his coat of arms has a black slave on it, and the Plymouth County Council have been told to remove it, and also rename John Hawkins square. So not a particularly pleasant guy. But he's busy trading slaves from Africa and the Caribbean. And there's a big port, there is Veracruz, and he's there when a large Spanish fleet comes into view, and they attack him. And he only has five ships, but he realizes his only chance is to try gunnery on the Spanish ships. And so he tries his gallery and it works. And he goes back to Queen Elizabeth, he gets away and he goes back to the Queen and says, Look, your Majesty, we need, we need to rethink how we fight here. And he becomes treasurer of the Navy, because his father in law was treasurer of the Navy, these things, rather like today, you know, they go down through genealogy. And so he's in a position where he can do something, and he draws up a plan for what he calls the reformation of the Navy, which is to take two ships into drydock every year and rebuild them so that their artillery will be used to maximum effect. The slide I showed you of that English ship with the low silhouette, and the long gun deck, that's Hawkins's doing. And by the time the Armada comes along, he's managed to repair, or build new, or rebuild about 24 ships, and they're armed to the teeth, and that's really all it takes. So it's not that Elizabeth had, you know, 130 ships as a superior to the Armada. She has about 24 ships, you know, the battleships, if you like, of the English, of the English, navy, and they do a terrific job. But it's really Hawkins I think, who is the hero of 1588.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Wonderful. We have several questions about sources really, and well, sources and discovery. So let me try to put these together for you. So the one question asks, "Can you talk about how archival findings in the 35 years since the first edition of your book come to have changed your understanding of the 1588 campaign?" The second sort of related question is, "was there any one discovery that excited you more than, than others?" And a final question, "are there still unanswered questions or subjects on the history of the Armada that you wish you could get at? If you were going to write an even more exhaustive history of it, what, what would you want to include in that discussion?"

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
Again, three, three brilliant questions. New documents. I, new sources was the question. There has been rather less new material on the underwater archaeology front. I mean, underwater archaeology is very, very expensive. And in the 1570s and early 1580s, the BBC had an archaeology unit that was very generous in funding, in making films about the excavation, so they would underwrite a lot of the costs. So there's the wrecks that I mention: the Girona is self-financed, Robert Sténuit does it by himself. But Colin Martin and his team, excavate the Trinidad Valencera, the Santa Maria della Rosa, and another ship that I didn't mention, called the Gran Grifón, which is a Baltic Merchantman, which they found on Fair Isle. Since then, it's been largely accidental. There's a wreck in Tobermory Bay on the Isle of Mull, but that was excavated in the 18th and the 19th century by a guy who thought that if you dynamited it, you would see, you would find the gold. Well, no, it didn't work out that way. And he managed to destroy what would have been a perfectly preserved ship. There would have been like another Mary Rose or another Vasa, the ship in Scotland. The others are off the coast of Ireland and the three of them on this place I was mentioning Streedagh Strand, the one you can see in the film, "Calvary", and their excavation is very much a product of cli-, you knew I was going to talk about climate. Climate change is really helping the archaeologists because huge, huge storms are coming in off the Atlantic and uncovering parts of the wrecked ships. We know there are three ships there, Colin and I managed to identify them. We found the dossiers, we know exactly what's there. But the problem with excavation is you have to preserve, and the conservation facilities are, are not fully developed. They're protected now by the Irish government, which passed a statute protecting them, and they, basically when something is uncovered by the new storms, they bring it out, they preserve it, they study it, etc., but they don't have, no one has the resources to do a dive on these three ships. It could be done, we know they're there. And we know there's a lot of gold there. But it's not feasible right at the moment. So there's, there's one of the new sources, the documents, if I may, I'll deal with that, because that's, that's what I did. That was my contribution. One discovery that made me nearly leap out of my seat. I mean, I think every historian has had in their life at least one occasion when the hair on their neck stands on the back, stands up, because you know you found something which either nobody has seen before or it's hiding in clear sight and you suddenly realize, oh, everybody's seen this, but look, this is really what it's about, there's something new. And that moment for me, the aha moment for me was in 1994 when a friend of mine Fernando Butha phoned me up, this is when I was in Madrid doing something else, and he phoned me up, said "Geoffrey, would you, do you have a morning free? We've something in the archives in Madrid that we can't, the archivist and I can't identify and we'd like to show it to you." Well, what else have I got to do? Why else would I be in Madrid? So off I go to the Archivo Histórico Nacional to a series called "military orders". 10,000 boxes, ordines militares all about finding out whether people proposed for knighthood had some Jewish heretical ancestors, whether they were the children of fornicating priests, or whether they had worked for a living. But six of those boxes, six of the 10,000 were labeled "Papeles Curiosos", "curious papers", unusual papers, and those were the ones that Fernando and the archivist, Maria Jesus Alvarez wanted me to look at. And when I looked at them, I realized that all six of them were about Phillip II's plans to invade England. And when I looked a little closer, I realized that one of the dossiers was a report by the second in command of the Armada a man called Juan Martinez de Recalde, which was a journal, a day by day journal, and six of the documents, six of the little reports he had drawn up for Medina-Sidonia and sent over to the flagship and they'd come back to Recalde with Medina-Sidonia's comments. It's the first, inter, inter, you know, the first communications between commanders that I know of under fire. And the reason Recalde sends them to the king is to try and inculpate Medina-Sidonia, because all of the little notes, they're called billetes, which he sends and the diary are putting Medina-Sidonia in a bad light, but luckily for Medina-Sidonia, Recalde dies is a week later and nobody follows up. But I must say finding that little trove in 1994 was my, my eureka moment. So what would I like to find? That was your third question, wasn't it? If I could, is there something I know isn't that the, what do we call it? The known, the known unknown. What do we know is there and we can't find it? Well, just like the Spanish Armada, the English navy, the Royal Navy, had a system of taking a list of what's issued to the ships before they go to sea each season and what's brought back, and what base fired, it's called "spent at the seas". And we have it for most years, we have it for 1596, when the Royal Navy goes to Cádiz and beats up the place. And there, we can see that they fire, most of the ships fire 500 rounds in a single day. And that's great, but it's, wouldn't it be nice to have the ones for 1588, but it's the one that's missing. So somewhere out there, audience, if you're listening, and you happen to know where the ordinance off, or the office of ordinance accounts are 1588, I would be very glad if you would email me and tell me where they are.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
We need to all check our attics and basements for that box that's been left behind.

Prof. Geoffrey Parker  
I mean, it's such significant year, somebody's taken it out, someone removed it from the archive, and it probably is in a muniments room or an attic or a basement. It's just too much of an accident that the one year we would all like to know about is the one that isn't there.

Dr. Nicholas Breyfogle  
Right. That's remarkable. In the vein of all good things must come to an end, we have, we've hit our hour here, Geoffrey, and I think this has been just a remarkable event. And I have the sense that we're all going to rush out now and, and get access to your book so that we can fill in many of the stories that, that are still to learn about that we haven't been able to get to today. There were so many questions. I'm so sorry, we couldn't get to all of them. And I will refer you to Geoffrey's book as the way I think to answer those. We've just put the book into the, a link to the book in the chat if anybody's looking for it, and we'll send out information about it when when we send out a follow up email. I do want to thank you all for joining us today and for your excellent questions. I'm very grateful to Geoffrey Parker for sharing his expertise and the amazing stories of the Spanish Armada. Please join me in giving him a virtual round of applause. Thank you so very, very, very much. I'd also like to thank the College of Arts and Sciences, especially Alex Stacklane, the Department of History, the Goldberg Center, and "Origins, Current Events in Historical Perspective", for their support of this event. Stay safe and healthy everyone. And again, many thanks to you, Geoffrey, and everybody for coming today. We'll see you next time. Take care and goodbye