The initial discussion of The Armada focuses on Garrett Mattingly’s language and style, and how it differs greatly from the other historical accounts assigned to the class. Professor Mead remarks that Mattingly is funny and does great things with language, which is how he gets people to pay attention to his writing on strategy. He weaves together literary references, jokes, historical facts and ironic humor, making all the players come alive.

A student asks whether this style of writing add subjectivity to the book. The student mentions a fairly dramatic scene about the execution of Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots as an example of this subjectivity. Professor Mead answers that as a critical reader, one must have the ability to doubt everything. Because Mattingly often talks about what he believes people thought, we have to understand he’s making a lot of assumptions about the people within the book. Mattingly assumes that the players within are smart and know what they’re doing; this may not be correct, but it helps the historical mysteries to become more lucid.

Further discussion of the book reveals that its narrative aspect can lead students to believe that political science—and theories about politics—do not explain much or help us in understanding the full complexity of historical events. But one student remarks that the true narrative function of the book is to highlight grand strategy.

The Spanish Armada (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Talk then turns to Elizabeth. The class discusses how Elizabeth is like Fabius – she doesn’t allow her opponents large gains, uses delays, and attacks from the back. There is a real similarity between Fabian and Elizabethan tactics. Neither can directly confront the enemy because they might lose, so they try to delay action as much as possible. Professor Mead asks the class what other great thinker espouses these ideas. The answer is Sun Tzu.

The class continues discussing Elizabeth, noting that her personal history needs to be understood in order to analyze her Fabian tactics and general war strategies. She is sensitive about concubines (due to her mother Anne Boleyn’s ignominious death), so executing Mary Stuart is a bitter reality for her. Her mother is killed because of Elizabeth herself; Anne Boleyn promised Henry VIII a male heir to the throne, but instead Elizabeth, a useless female, was born. Thereafter declared a bastard and having lost all of her legitimacy, Elizabeth faces the constant tension of being killed because of the Boleyn household’s links with the Reformation. She herself is not strictly religious, but all of her life she has symbolized the Protestant faith. Her childhood is marred with succession issues and rumors of her being at the center of plots which she has noting to do with. She is to her half-sister Mary what Mary Stuart is to her.

Professor Mead notes that Elizabeth’s survival strategy during Mary’s reign involved delay, avoidance and most important of all, keeping away from commitment to any particular cause or person. She played for high stakes from a place of weakness—and she ultimately survives Mary. It is only natural that Elizabeth continued to rely on this strategy when she was queen; it worked for her before, and it could certainly work again. She would have used this strategy regardless of its wisdom at the time.

A student remarks that Elizabethan strategy was the right move, but that she was careless at times. Distracting Phillip by going to the south of France made sense. But her involvement in the Netherlands and keeping a relationship with Henry of Navarre were both unwise decisions.

Professor Mead then remarks that in operations at sea, a lot of things would have to go wrong for the English to lose. But on land, the English army is not very able. They don’t have good experience with peer competitors, and they lack the ability to put together forces to counter Spain on land. But if England did not put Spain in its place both by land and sea, then Spain would have grown in the next hundreds of years to be stronger than England. If they were to gain control of the Low Countries, they would be able to build up their navy and rule.

Professor Mead notes that this has parallels with many past historical situations. Although Athens was powerful at sea, it underestimated Sparta’s ability to fight on that front. As Sparta gained ground and found more resources, it was ultimately able to win at sea despite losing a number of sea battles. The lesson here is that a state must be able to fight on many fronts, despite weakness in a few, if it wants to deter the enemy for an extended period. Thus, England can’t give up on land because it is possible that they will later lose the sea – this is part of their strategic thought throughout the next 400 years of history. This makes the theatre in the Low Countries very important. England is forced to do something that it doesn’t want to do because the alternative could be worse.

Professor Mead continues, noting that there can be advantages to a contest you can’t win, because just showing up to that contest can still decrease your chances of defeat in the main theatre. It requires you to put money into a black hole, and although Elizabeth begrudged every penny she spent, she had an understanding of this strategic reality. For instance, to keep the Dutch in the war, a strong English presence was required, which allowed the Dutch to keep going. Here Elizabeth got more bang for the buck than it may have appeared at first glance.

Discussion now turns to Philip’s strategy. A student believes that his strategy was very hasty. For instance, communication between the Armada and Parma wasn’t worked out at all, and Philip sent out his fleet too quickly, before a proper strategy could be planned.

This focuses the class upon King Philip’s broader strategy – England played a much smaller role in his planning than Elizabeth believed. He was trying to do two or three things at once. He was both a long and short-term strategist.

First, a look at the Hapsburg strategy is necessary. The motto of the Hapsburg house was, “Others wage war, thou happy Austria, marry.” In other words, the Hapsburgs expand only through inheritance. They have a multigenerational marriage strategy. They inherited the Netherlands by marrying enough daughters into the house of Burgundy so that it would come over to them in time. Much of Europe was still under Salic law, which stated that succession couldn’t pass through a woman. Under this law they were able to create situations in which a Hapsburg was the oldest heir. And Philip II was the husband of Mary. If they had a son, that son would have been the heir to England, Spain and Portugal.

Professor Mead continues: At this point, Philip has just inherited Spain. Although the book rarely discusses it, Phillip’s main enemy is the Ottoman Empire – which has another hundred years before it’s defeated outside of Vienna. Up until the 1700s, the Ottoman Empire was arguably the greatest power in Europe.

Philip’s revenue is coming from Italy. He has a great deal of power in Genoa – banking power. The Genoese are feeding his fleets. He is constantly concerned about how he can maintain that flow of funds. He can get the treasure in, but the Ottoman problem occupies most of his attention. England is simply a small nuisance for Philip, who is playing a long game for control of Europe. He deals with England at this point only because he has a free hand; England doesn’t mean much to him on the grander scale of things, as Philip is the first person to rule a truly global empire. He rules the Philippines, Indonesia, all of Latin America including Brazil, half of North America, and the Cape of Good Hope. Naturally his vision of strategy and opportunities is very different from Elizabeth’s. His biggest enemy is not England but the Muslims: the Omanis, the Mughal empire, the Saffavids, and the Ottomans.

The Spanish also have the experience of suppressing demon worshippers and getting gold. This happens first in Mexico and then in Peru. And by this point they have more gold than anybody in the world. The Spanish have a certain idea of how the world works.

Professor Mead lectures further on Philip. Philip thinks that he understands the English – “I’ve been king of that place.” His knowledge of England is that Catholics and Protestants are at each other’s throats, and the Crown of England is very poor. There is a quarrelsome parliament that doesn’t give Queen the money she wants. Of course they can build ships, but he has a whole list of reasons to underestimate what the English can do. It wasn’t even so clear that England had the best navy at the time, either. Phillip controls one third of the world, so England doesn’t seem like such a large threat.

The class then begins to discuss grand strategy in Libya. Right now, the rebels are retreating and NATO has taken command. Qadhafi’s circle has splintered a bit, but we have also discovered that he has a great deal of gold, which is less vulnerable to banking sanctions and is a reliable source for financing war. That he has recognized this shows he has been planning for a long time.

Students debate what Qadhafi’s next move should be. One says that he must regain control of Benghazi as swiftly as possible. As for now, he has begun putting his armies in cities, and when there are big air raids Arabs are starting to see Western planes bomb Arab cities. He’s using that image to slowly gather support for moving Western forces out of the country. But is Qadhafi toast? It’s anybody’s guess; a student says that because the situation on the ground can change at any moment, Qadhafi is in a very precarious position. But what he can do is attack alliances; like using Turkey to break up NATO or threatening the Arab League. He can also use the identity of the rebels who are fighting him (they just came back from fighting Americans in Afghanistan) to pull America out of the game. He may try to highlight the presence of Islamic radicals amongst the rebels to further ensure America’s withdrawal, but he must do so through a secret channel like Wikileaks to ensure that no one knows the information is coming from him.

What should Obama do at this point? Students are divided—some say he should leave immediately and some say he should stay. If he leaves, the reasons for intervening in the first place will be delegitimized and his image will be tarnished. If he stays, it could drag on for a long time, and there are other revolts in the Middle East (Syria) that he should be more focused on. No conclusions are drawn about Obama except that, as always, he must weigh the costs and benefits of staying in Libya, and choose the most beneficial action—even though it may hurt him in the short term and have a steep political price.

When I told my Uncle that I was reading Garrett Mattingly’s The Armada, he said, “Do you know what the biggest mistake of the Spanish Armada was? They left port!” He meant it as a joke, but the assertion that the Armada was doomed before it even set sail is more accurate than not. King Philip of Spain, in the impatience that characterized his nature for many months following the death of Mary Stuart, dispatched a fleet whose ships, guns, and crew simply could not match up with those of its opponent, which enjoyed a crucial advantage in fighting so close to its own shores. Although Mattingly briefly mentions the failure of the Armada to cut off the Ark Royal along the coast of Torbay as one mistake that could conceivably have swung the war in Spain’s favor, he largely shares the opinion that whatever blame is to be assigned for the Spanish defeat should not be placed on Medina Sidonia, the Armada’s commander. With the hastily put together, ill-equipped and under-trained fleet he was given, Sidonia did the best he could. If the general is not to blame, then who is? All the evidence points to King Philip.

Philip could not claim ignorance regarding the state of his fleet; his generals begged him for more time and supplies before and during the war. Compounding the lack of material preparation was a failure to fully think through many critical stages of the conflict, which was equally detrimental to the Spanish mission. For starters, Philip’s insistence on the full mobilization of his fleet during the winter months while it was waiting to reach its full capacity led to the serious deterioration of the ships and crews that were ready. Additionally, the plan to protect Parma’s flotilla as it made its way across the English Channel was critically flawed. The Spanish ships drew deeper than those of its enemy along the Dutch coastline – so much deeper, in fact, that they would be unable to provide any protection for the barges until they were several leagues off the coast. That unguarded interval would prove too dangerous to close, and as a result, Parma’s ships could never have reached the Armada. Here too, however, the King was fully aware of these difficulties, and yet, far from providing any instructions on the matter to his Captain General, he failed even to mention this weakness. When seemingly insurmountable difficulties arose in the campaign, Philip’s message to his generals appears to have been, “I don’t care how you do it, just do it.” What made the King so sure that they could?

The Spanish Armada (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Philip genuinely believed that Spain, under his rule, was the executor of God’s will on Earth. He was certain that the Spanish were God’s chosen people, whose destiny it was to unite all of Europe under the Catholic faith. In this conception, the interests of Spain and the will of God were one and the same, and every Spanish victory was seen as a triumph of God over the forces of evil. And even for a less pious individual than Philip, the idea that Spain enjoyed a special relationship with history made a lot of sense, for reasons that Mattingly sums up nicely:

“Most important of all was the fact the Spain under Philip had moved from victory to victory. ‘Fate,’ men called it in the sixteenth century, or ‘Divine Providence,’ the irresistible will of God. Centuries later they were to talk about ‘the wave of the future’ or the triumph of objective historical forces, but all they meant really, at either time, was that one success or one failure seems to foreshadow another, because it’s always easier to imagine things going on in the same way than to imagine a change.”

If King Philip was willing to entrust his fortune to God, so too were his commanders, one of whom, when asked if he thought the Spanish would win, replied in the affirmative:

“It’s very simple. It is well known that we fight in God’s cause. So, when we meet the English, God will surely arrange matters so that we can grapple and board them, either by sending some strange freak of weather or, more likely, just by depriving the English of their wits. […] But unless God helps us by a miracle the English, […] will knock us to pieces with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt. So, we are sailing against England in the confident hope of a miracle.”

It is not impiety to suggest that there are some problems with a strategy predicated on the belief that God will intervene where the strategy would ordinarily fail. This is a lesson King Philip learns the hard way, when he later remarks, “It is impiety, and almost blasphemy, to presume to know the will of God. It comes from the sin of pride. Even kings […] must submit to being used by God’s will without knowing what it is. They must never seek to use it.” Moreover, this lack of strategic planning had the adverse effect of convincing the Duke of Parma that victory could not be achieved; as a result, he carried out his duties half-heartedly, going through the motions without truly preparing for battle. One could argue, perhaps, that Parma was truly a believer, and, like Philip, fully expected God to arrange things in his favor. But this is a stretch, and even if true would only further serve the point: faith in Providence is not a strategy—it is a gamble.

When I was about four years old, somewhere between The Count of Monte Cristo and a biography of Hitler, my father read me The Armada. I have remembered very little from these books, and from The Armada in particular I could remember nothing at all, save for the name of my favorite protagonist—Sir Francis Drake. This early knowledge is admittedly a small source of pride for me, if simply because the only Drake known to most of my generation is the Canadian “Degrassi” star turned hip-hop artist, the lyrical dynamo who so famously exclaims, “I know way to many people here right now that I didn’t know last year—who the [heck] are ya’ll?” (Sir Francis would commend the latter Drake on such a healthy distrust of those around him). But I digress. What was interesting to me, the second time around, is that even in the midst of characters whose decisions had considerably more effect on the outcome of the war, particularly Queen Elizabeth, King Phillip, Lord Admiral Howard and General Sidonia, it is Vice-Admiral Drake who shines the brightest. All throughout Europe in the lead-up to the war, people, “were coming to speak of the naval war between Spain and England as if it were a personal duel between King Philip and Francis Drake. […] Later, when the navies of England and Spain were at grips in the Channel, Germans and Frenchmen, Spaniards and Italians wrote as if the English fleet were merely and extension of Drake’s person […] just as if it the queen’s fleet had no other admiral, and indeed as if it were not the queen’s fleet at all.”

Immediately after the war, the English grumbled about the indecisiveness of the result, and attributed whatever victory had been achieved to Drake rather than Lord Admiral Howard. Though more recent accounts such as Mattingly’s stress that “this was Howard’s war, and he won it,” Drake remains the war’s most colorful figure, and for some, its most iconic. It is Drake’s dynamic persona that leaves such a lasting impression—a fusion of staggering boldness and risible peculiarity. His disdain for the traditions of English naval procedure and etiquette and his willingness to “go it alone” helped make him a maverick in his day. Gruff, daring, and (to the delight of the reader) syntactically challenged, Drake is a character not easily forgotten. It did help, of course, that he pulled off some daring victories, at times bringing the battle right to the Spanish harbors, and he had the remarkable ability (or luck) to come upon and seize many valuable prizes at sea.

Sir Francis Drake (Source: Wikimedia Commons)

Mattingly’s portrayal of Drake is exemplary of his novelistic flair. He does great justice to all his characters, lending each a detailed and lively depiction to imbue the reader with a humanized understanding of their thinking and motivations. Mattingly’s account is masterfully crafted; it is a historical telling of the highest quality. The author is thorough but never boring. Like many novelists, he follows one chain of events for a while, and then circles back to an earlier date to track the same events from another perspective. All the while, the reader is comfortable and entertained, and would be none the more contented to read a great work of fiction. In this, Mattingly does a great service to the work of historians; he roundly dispels any notion that the facts need to be stretched or dishonestly embellished for the readers’ enjoyment.

That is not to say that a historian need only present the facts to make the story worth reading. It is the way that Mattingly puts the pieces together—like a detective solving a mystery—that make the story so compelling. He doesn’t matter-of-factly state things he doesn’t know; he uses reason and logic to propose what is, in his opinion, most likely the case. Any writer of non-fiction should be inspired by this author’s ability to pick through the inconsistencies and mistaken assumptions of previous historical accounts and from there conjecture what in fact is more likely to have happened. One comes away from The Armada with a feeling that they have turned over every stone and seen the puzzle put together with nearly all of its pieces in place and accounted for. I say “nearly” because, just as Mattingly can make his best guesses at what transpired several centuries ago, so can we.

This can be seen in Mattingly’s description of a confrontation between Henry III of France and a group of Parisians. In the tense standoff between the guards of Henry the III and the citizens of Paris on May 12, 1588, it was the shooting of a non-combatant—a shopkeeper—that ignited the violence. Mattingly leaves open the question of who fired the first shot, but by employing some basic logic we can say that it was more likely fired by a Leaguer or a citizen than by one of the guards. The guards were in the process of carefully withdrawing to the Louvre, and they were under strict orders against engaging in any violence against the citizens. The citizens, meanwhile, were eager for a fight, and the Leaguers knew that “the king might have to be prodded into some rash act of violence which would incite a popular uprising.” Seeing the guards retreating peacefully to the Louvre, the Leaguers probably felt like a window was closing. They needed to do something to spark the violence, and the apparent killing of a shopkeeper might provide the incitement they needed.  No one would suspect the Leaguers guilt in the murder. This is just a conjecture, but it is plausible, and certainly more devious actions have been taken in war.