Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada

Elizabeth I reigned from 1558 to 1603, and in that time England became firmly Protestant, survived Catholic plots and the threat of invasion, and in 1588 saw a great Spanish fleet, the Armada, defeated and scattered. She never married, and turned that into a political image: the Virgin Queen, wedded to her people.^•

Philip II of Spain, the most powerful ruler in Europe, sent about 130 ships to escort an invasion army from the Netherlands. English fireships broke the Armada’s formation off Calais, the Battle of Gravelines followed, and storms wrecked many more ships as they fled round Scotland and Ireland. Elizabeth’s speech to her troops at Tilbury, with its line about having “the heart and stomach of a king”, survives only in later versions, but it became part of the legend.^•

The reign had darker sides. Catholic priests were executed as traitors, Mary Queen of Scots was beheaded in 1587, and the conquest of Ireland was pursued with brutal violence. But the era of Shakespeare, Marlowe and Spenser, the first English colonies in America and a sense of national destiny gave the English a story about themselves they have told ever since.^•

Why it matters today