I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman; but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a king of England too.
Elizabeth I, speech to the troops at Tilbury, August 1588
The Spanish Armada
date: sailed from Lisbon in May 1588; defeated at Gravelines on 8 August 1588
Spanish commander: Alonso Pérez de Guzmán, 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia
English commanders: Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham; Sir Francis Drake (second in command); Sir John Hawkins; Martin Frobisher
Spanish fleet: about 130 ships, carrying roughly 18,000 soldiers and 7,000 sailors
English fleet: about 200 ships of all sizes, most of them small armed merchantmen
Spanish losses: around a third of the fleet and perhaps 15,000 men, most in the storms of the voyage home
result: English victory; the planned invasion of England never took place
(Dates are given in the modern calendar, which Spain already used in 1588. English accounts of the time, on the older Julian calendar, run ten days earlier.)
For most of Elizabeth I's reign, England and Spain avoided open war. Philip II of Spain had been married to Elizabeth's half-sister, Mary I, and had briefly been King of England. After Mary's death in 1558 he even proposed to Elizabeth. But Philip ruled the most powerful empire in the world and saw himself as the defender of the Catholic Church, and Protestant England stood in the way of both.
The Road to War
The quarrel built up over twenty years. English seamen such as John Hawkins and Francis Drake raided Spanish ships and settlements in the Americas, and Elizabeth quietly invested in their voyages. Drake's voyage around the world from 1577 to 1580 brought home Spanish treasure worth more than the Crown's annual income, and in 1581 he was knighted on the deck of the Golden Hind at Deptford, in the queen's presence. In the Netherlands, the Protestant Dutch provinces were in revolt against Spanish rule. In 1585, after the assassination of their leader, William the Silent, Elizabeth signed the Treaty of Nonsuch and sent an army under Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, to help them. To Philip that was an act of war.
The final provocation came in February 1587, when Elizabeth's government executed Mary, Queen of Scots, after the Babington Plot. Mary had been the Catholic heir to the English throne, and her death removed any hope of putting a Catholic on it peacefully. You can read the letters surrounding her death on our page on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots. Philip now prepared to invade.
The Enterprise of England
Philip's plan, which he called the Enterprise of England, had two parts. A great fleet would sail from Spain up the English Channel to Flanders. There it would meet the Duke of Parma, Philip's commander in the Netherlands, and escort his army of around 27,000 veterans across the narrow sea in barges to land in Kent and march on London. The weakness of the plan lay in the join between the two halves. Parma had no deep-water port where the big ships could anchor, and Dutch rebel flyboats patrolled the shallows off the Flemish coast, ready to attack his barges if they put to sea without protection.
Preparations took more than a year and were delayed again in April 1587, when Drake sailed into the harbour at Cádiz and destroyed more than twenty ships. Off Cape St Vincent afterwards he burned a large stock of seasoned barrel staves, which left the fleet short of good casks for water and food. Drake called it "singeing the King of Spain's beard." Then in February 1588 the Armada's experienced commander, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, died. Philip replaced him with the Duke of Medina Sidonia, a wealthy nobleman who wrote to the king begging to be excused, pleading that he had no experience of the sea or of war and was always seasick. Philip refused.
The Armada Sails
The Armada left Lisbon at the end of May 1588: about 130 ships, including warships, armed merchantmen, galleasses and supply hulks, carrying some 30,000 men. Storms forced it into Corunna to repair and restock, and it did not reach the entrance to the Channel until 29 July, when an English captain sighted it off the Lizard in Cornwall. A chain of beacons carried the news along the coast to London. According to a story first recorded long afterwards, Drake was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe and insisted on finishing his game; true or not, the tide was against him, and the English fleet could not leave Plymouth until that night.
The English slipped out and got behind the Spanish, upwind of them, which gave them the choice of when to attack. The Armada sailed up the Channel in a tight crescent formation, several miles from tip to tip, with its strongest ships on the wings. The English ships were lower, faster and more manoeuvrable, and their guns were better suited to firing at range. The Spanish tactic was to close with the enemy, grapple and board, using their soldiers. The English refused to let them. In running fights off Plymouth, Portland Bill and the Isle of Wight, the two fleets fired thousands of rounds at each other and did surprisingly little damage. The Spanish lost two ships by accident: the San Salvador was wrecked by an explosion, and the Nuestra Señora del Rosario collided with another ship and was left behind. Drake, who was supposed to be leading the English fleet through the night with his stern lantern, put out the light and went off to capture the Rosario and its pay chest, leaving the rest of the fleet to follow the Spanish lanterns in the dark.
Fireships at Calais
On 6 August the Armada anchored off Calais, still in formation and still largely intact. Medina Sidonia sent messages to Parma, only to learn that Parma's army would need days to embark and could not come out without an escort. The Spanish were stuck in an exposed anchorage with the English fleet just upwind.
Around midnight on 7 August the English sent eight fireships, old vessels packed with pitch, tar and gunpowder, their guns loaded to fire as the heat reached them, drifting on the wind and tide into the anchored fleet. The Spanish remembered the "hellburners" of Antwerp three years earlier, fireships that had killed hundreds. Although the English fireships did not burn a single Spanish ship, their captains panicked, cut their anchor cables and scattered into the night. The formation that had protected the Armada all the way up the Channel was gone.
The Battle of Gravelines
At dawn on 8 August the English attacked the scattered Spanish ships off Gravelines, on the Flemish coast. For the first time they closed in to short range, firing into the hulls. The fighting lasted most of the day. The English sank or drove ashore several Spanish ships and damaged many more, and only a change in the wind saved the Armada from being driven onto the Flemish sandbanks. The Spanish had lost their chance. With the wind blowing from the south-west, they could not turn back down the Channel to meet Parma, and Medina Sidonia chose to take the fleet home the long way, north around Scotland and west of Ireland. The English followed as far as the Firth of Forth, then turned back, low on powder and food.
Tilbury
England did not yet know the danger had passed. An army gathered at Tilbury in Essex to defend the Thames against Parma's crossing, and on 18 and 19 August (the 8th and 9th by the English calendar), Elizabeth visited it. Wearing a silver breastplate, according to later tradition, she rode among the troops and made the most famous speech of her reign, telling them that she had come "to live or die amongst you all" and that though she had "the body of a weak and feeble woman," she had "the heart and stomach of a king." Read more about her on our page on Queen Elizabeth I.
The Voyage Home
The long voyage home did more damage than the English guns. The Spanish charts of the northern waters were poor, their ships were damaged and short of anchors, the water casks made from green wood leaked, and the men were sick and starving. In September Atlantic gales drove dozens of ships onto the coasts of Scotland and Ireland. About two dozen were wrecked on the Irish coast alone, including the galleass Girona, which went down off the Giant's Causeway with about 1,300 men. Survivors who struggled ashore in Ireland were often killed, by local people or by English soldiers under orders to show no mercy. About sixty-five ships limped back to Spain, and perhaps half the men who had sailed never came home.
England celebrated with medals and paintings, including the "Armada Portrait" of Elizabeth with the Spanish fleet wrecked in the background. One commemorative medal carried the words "God blew and they were scattered." The victory cost few English lives in battle, but thousands of English seamen died of typhus and dysentery in the weeks afterwards, many of them unpaid.
What the Armada Changed
The defeat of the Armada did not end the war. England's counter-attack, the "English Armada" under Drake and Sir John Norris in 1589, failed at a heavy cost, and Philip sent further armadas in 1596 and 1597, both scattered by storms. Peace came only in 1604, after Elizabeth and Philip were both dead. Spain rebuilt its navy and its treasure fleets kept sailing.
But 1588 mattered. England remained Protestant and independent, and the idea took hold, in England and in the Protestant Netherlands, that God was on their side. The campaign showed what ships armed with guns and handled at range could do against a fleet built for boarding, and English seamen took that lesson into the following century. And the story of a small nation, a queen at Tilbury and a Protestant wind became part of how the English saw themselves for four hundred years.
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Link will appear as Hanson, Marilee. "The Spanish Armada, 1588" https://englishhistory.net/tudor/spanish-armada/, September 30, 2026