HIST 102 #10 - The Dutch Revolt and the Anglo-Spanish War

Hello, welcome back to our lecture series for Western Civilization 102. During our last lecture, Dr. Robison discussed the German and French Wars of Religion. So again, we have a common theme of religion throughout this first unit.

Now, today, Dr. Robinson will move on and discuss the Dutch Revolt, which also has to do with religion, and the Anglo-Spanish War. So that will be our topic today. Now, the three countries that we are most concerned with during this upcoming lecture, there will be an in-depth discussion about the country of Spain and its very, uh, important and prominent ruler in Philip, King Philip II, who was the son of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. I'm sure you've remembered a lot about Charles V. He's the one that had to deal with Luther and the Ottoman Turks. He ended up retiring, in fact, which was not exactly the normal thing for a Holy Roman Emperor. So his son, Philip II, is the King of Spain. Very Spain is very Catholic at this time, and Philip will inherit the Netherlands when he comes to power.

And so that brings us to our second country that will be discussed in depth during today's lecture. The Netherlands wasn't exactly as we know it today. If you look on a current map, it will eventually evolve into modern-day Netherlands and, of course, modern-day Belgium, but that wasn't always the case. And it's actually extremely interesting to find out how this region was shaped through warfare, through revolt, as we'll find out. The Dutch Revolt, they actually will revolt against Spain and against Philip II, and we'll also discover how the modern-day map is formed up here in this region of the Netherlands.

Now, the Netherlands will find, again, religion not so much Lutheranism now, okay, but Calvinism. It will be between Catholicism and Calvinism, and of course, you have to throw in power and ambition. That's quite obvious, but again, religion plays a key role throughout most of this late 16th century. What we see here, the dealings between countries in Europe, and of course, the third country that Dr. Robinson will focus on in his lecture today has to be, of course, Anglo-English England. And we've already heard from previous lectures a little bit about English history. We've learned about King Henry VII and the, um, the English Reformation and what's happening in England in the 16th century, early to mid-16th century. We've already discovered that one of his children will become the greatest monarch in English history. Her name was Elizabeth the First, and Elizabeth will also be a focus here. You have Philip II in Spain, and you have Elizabeth in England. Now, as far as the Netherlands are concerned, there were quite a few people that will play a key role in this, this Dutch Revolt, as you'll find out upcoming.

Now, Elizabeth, of course, wasn't the only one of Henry VII's children to rule. Of course, she's known as the greatest monarch in English history, ironic, of course, with her being a female when Henry VIII, as you've learned in a previous lecture, so desperately wanted a son because he wanted to ensure that the Tudor dynasty, his family, would continue ruling in England after his death. And of course, we have learned that Philip's, that Henry VII of England's son, Edward VI, did manage to come to the throne for a short while. He was not very healthy, and, um, and we'll also notice that in previous lectures, Mary, Henry VII's oldest daughter, will actually rule as well. So England, internally, England is not spared this religious conflict that we see occurring throughout Europe between Catholicism and Protestantism. And of course, with Elizabeth's reign, you'll find out from Dr. Robinson that she manages to form somewhat of a compromise so that England can turn its focus elsewhere and not just focus on their internal problems or maybe even a religious civil war, because every other country seems to have had basically that same problem. Um, so we have Spain, we have the Netherlands, and we have England. And let's find out from Dr. Robinson how these three countries will come together and how they deal with each other in the late 16th century.

The second half of the 16th century witnessed a European-wide struggle between Catholicism and Calvinism. In our previous lecture, we discussed one aspect of that with the French religious wars, which enjoyed their first phase or experienced their first phase between 1562 and 1598. There would be a second round beginning in 1614 and lasting to 1629. That will be discussed in the next unit. But there was also other conflict. There was conflict in the Netherlands between Catholics loyal to Philip II of Spain, the overlord of the Netherlands, and Calvinists who revolted against his influence. And overarching all of this, an Anglo-Spanish war that broke out in the 1580s, pitting Catholic Spain against Protestant England, and the Catholic hero Philip II against the Protestant hero Elizabeth the First. In fact, Philip and Elizabeth would come to have involvement in all three of these conflicts. For Philip supported the Catholics in France, Elizabeth supported the Huguenots. There, Philip opposed the Dutch Calvinist rebels, Elizabeth supported them, and ultimately, Elizabeth and Philip fought against each other.

So let's begin by talking a little bit about Philip in Spain and Elizabeth in England. Philip II is properly regarded as the creator of absolutist monarchy, modern absolutist monarchy of the sort that would exist in the 17th and 18th centuries. That is absolutist monarchy based upon a single individual who was thought to rule by divine right, that is, because he was God's chosen ruler. Now, he's not the first ruler to rule absolutely. He's not the first ruler to comply to claim divine sanction for his authority, but he is the first to systematize it, to develop a theory behind it, and to make it work in a very efficient way. It's important not to exaggerate this too much. Philip II had serious problems, but there is a direct line between the methods he used and those later perfected by Louis XIV in France in the late 17th century.

Philip came to the throne of Spain in 1556, following his father's retirement. Essentially, his father, Charles V, had stepped down as both King of Spain and Holy Roman Emperor. His brother, Ferdinand I, taking over in the Empire, and Philip taking over in Spain. Of course, taking over in Spain meant that Philip ruled not only Spain proper, but also much of Italy, many of the islands in the Western Mediterranean, portions of the Old Kingdom of Burgundy, including the Netherlands, and the vast Spanish Empire in the New World. He was well-educated. He had experience from, uh, his very young days. He was an extremely devout Christian who, in his later life, became quite ascetic. He was a patron of the arts and literature, and not insignificantly, he was what we would today call a workaholic. He worked extraordinarily long hours. He looked at virtually every document that passed through his government. If you should become a historian of late 16th century Spain, you'll notice his signature on almost every document you look at.

So he had the personality and the ability to create an absolutist government. He built this around a council called the Council of State, which supervised 12 other councils that handled every aspect of government. What this did was that it funneled all information directly to him. The 12 subsidiary councils each handled their business, they reported to the Council of State, and it reported directly to him. One of the things that he did to enhance his power was that he kept the individual subcouncils from knowing what the others were doing. The only person who had the big picture was Philip. Another thing that he did was that he often appointed rivals, people who didn't like each other, who had different opinions about policy, to the same council so that they would argue, so that they would work out the best possible policy, and also to be quite honest, so that they would report on each other to him.

Another thing that he did was to try to limit the power of the greater nobility in Spain. The greater nobility, the grandees, were those who had enough land, enough wealth, and enough power to pose a threat to Philip. And so he largely excluded them from any political role to keep from giving them the opportunity to become a threat to him. Instead, he used a lower class of gentry. I don't mean that they were lower class, simply below the grandees, called the hidalgos, who were still powerful enough to be effective as officials, but who were not powerful enough to threaten him, and who quite rightly recognized that they owed their elevation to government office to Philip, and therefore were very loyal to him. He also had to deal with a semi-representative institution in each of the two main subdivisions of Spain, the Old Kingdom of Castile and the Old Kingdom of Aragon. Each of which had a body known as the Cortes, which had the power to approve taxes and new law and what have you.

Now, Philip's Empire included those two Spanish kingdoms of Aragon and Castile, the Netherlands, Burgundy, a region south of Burgundy known as the Franche-Comté, the Italian city of Milan, the Italian Kingdom of Naples, the island of Sicily, the island of Sardinia, the Balearic Islands, the American and Far Eastern colonies, some North African possessions, and from 1580, the Kingdom of Portugal, which he inherited, although he had to conquer it to make the inheritance real. In his early years, one of the principal enemies that Philip II faced was the Turks, because Spain is both a Mediterranean and an Atlantic power. And in 1571, Spain won a crushing victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto. It is not insignificant that five years earlier, the great Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent had died, and the Ottoman Turks would never again have a ruler as effective or as powerful as Suleiman, although they would have some very powerful rulers. Nevertheless, the Turks were generally regarded up until 1571 as having the most powerful navy in the Mediterranean, a status they had held since they had managed to make themselves superior in that regard to the Italian city-state of Venice. However, at the Battle of Lepanto, the Spanish defeated the Turks, sent much of the Turkish navy to the bottom of the sea, and made themselves the new naval lords of the Mediterranean. Furthermore, the Spanish were also spreading out in the Atlantic due to their wide-ranging colonial empire, and thus they came to be seen as the dominant naval power in the Atlantic as well, which they would continue to enjoy until challenged by the English.

Now, the English were led, rather unusually at this time, by a woman, Queen Elizabeth the First, the second female ruler of England in a row. She was preceded by her sister, her older sister Mary, a staunch Catholic known for burning some 300 heretics at the stake and hence nicknamed Bloody Mary from time to time. Mary had actually been married to Philip II of Spain, and the possibility had existed there for a while of Spain and England becoming sort of a single empire. But Mary died childless in 1558, and her Protestant younger sister Elizabeth took her place.

Now, Elizabeth as Queen faced a great many challenges. One of these is the fact that she was a woman ruling in a century that regarded women rulers with suspicion, and she faced this suspicion not only from her enemies, from her very best friends as well. Many of her own counselors believed that she should really follow their advice and simply serve as a sort of figurehead, which she absolutely refused to do. She found herself at times at odds with the English Parliament, the one representative institution in Europe in the 16th century that had a fair amount of power on its own. She also faced the question of what to do about marriage. It was assumed that Elizabeth would marry, rather, by everybody except Elizabeth herself. After all, monarchs had two primary duties: one, to defend the realm, and the other, to produce an heir. The only way for Elizabeth to do that was to marry, and in fact, she drove her counselors crazy because she refused to do so and left the question of who would follow her on the throne in limbo, literally, until she was on her deathbed.

Why she chose not to marry, uh, is the subject of an enormous amount of discussion among historians, but she had a couple of very good reasons not to. One was the difficulty of finding an appropriate husband. If, on the one hand, she married a foreign royal, as her sister Mary had done, she ran the risk of subordinating herself to a foreign male ruler and of subordinating England to the whims of a foreign country. If, on the other hand, she married one of her own subjects, she ran the risk of raising up one family at the expense of others and promoting, uh, jealousy and perhaps even civil war in England. So one way to avoid that was not to marry. Another reason that she had for not marrying is that as long as she remained single, she remained the most eligible bachelorette in Europe. Everyone, even Catholic countries, wanted to marry a member of their royal family to Elizabeth because with Elizabeth came England, and many Catholic rulers thought that they might be able to convert her to Catholicism. Many Protestant rulers had no, had no problem with that. But Elizabeth essentially used herself as bait in the diplomatic games of the later 16th century. She held out the possibility that she might marry into another royal family, but never actually followed through. She was especially skillful in doing this with the French, who remained fairly friendly to England in spite of the fact that France was largely Catholic and England largely Protestant, because of the possibility of a marriage linking the two.

Elizabeth also faced the problem of religion. Her father, Henry VIII, had broken with Rome. Her brother, Edward VI, had taken England into genuine Protestant territory. Her older sister, Mary, had taken England back to the Catholic realm. What would she do? Well, at the time that she became Queen, she was a fairly moderate Protestant who would have probably been happy to go back to the way things were under her father, Henry VII. But circumstances would not allow that to happen, as we'll see. Another problem she faced was her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots, a woman who was not only the rightful Queen of Scotland but also had a blood claim to the English throne, which would be a problem, as we'll see in a minute, as well.

Elizabeth lived through the French Wars of Religion. The whole first phase, 1562-98, occurred during her reign. She lived through the Dutch Revolt. The whole thing, 1567-1609, practically occurred during her reign, only a few years longer than she was around. And of course, she had to deal with the Anglo-Spanish War.

Now, when it came to religion, the way that Elizabeth handled that is through a series of steps that historians call the Elizabethan Settlement. All these occurred early in her reign and set the stage for what was supposed to be the undisputed establishment. Part of this is that Parliament passed something called the Act of Supremacy, recognizing Elizabeth as the Supreme Governor of the Church in England. It also passed the Act of Uniformity, which required that all people worship according to the same format as laid out in the Book of Common Prayer, created by Thomas Cranmer in the reign of her brother, Edward VI. The church issued 39 Articles laying out the basics of English belief, but not everyone accepted these equally. Those people who were more or less satisfied with the Elizabethan Settlement are people who, at least retroactively, we refer to as Anglicans. But there were two groups of people who weren't entirely satisfied. There were people who remained loyal to the Catholic Church and who wanted to see England restored to Catholicism, and they are referred to in England as the Recusants. There were also others who believed that the church had not been sufficiently purified of Catholic elements and who wanted to see it further purified, and thus are known as Puritans.

Elizabeth's hope was to create a big tent sort of church where Catholics could feel comfortable, where Puritans could feel comfortable, where Anglicans would be at the center, so to speak. But that proved to be impossible. For one thing, neither the Recusants nor the Puritans wanted that. For another thing, in 1570, she was excommunicated by the Pope. And you might say, well, what does that matter? She wasn't a Catholic. Why does she care about that? Well, along with that comes the order from the Pope that good Catholics in England are to depose Elizabeth and replace her with a Catholic monarch. This meant that English Catholics had to make a choice. Now, they had been able to sort of exist in a world of semi-denial, being loyal to both the church and to Elizabeth prior to this. Now they had to choose either her or loyalty to Rome. And so what happens is that over the course of her reign, there is a growing religious struggle. It is, uh, made worse by the fact that the Catholic Church began sending missionaries into England to try to reconvert England, most notably the Jesuits, and these became involved in a number of plots to overthrow Elizabeth.

Most of those plots centered around Elizabeth's cousin, Mary, the Queen of Scots, who early in her life had grown up in France and been briefly married, if you recall, to the French King Francis I. After his death, however, she returned to Scotland, which was at the moment, at least, at peace with England. In 1565, she married a cousin, Lord Darnley, who also had some English royal blood, and they produced a son who much later would become James I of England. In 1566, Lord Darnley was mysteriously murdered. Many people pointed the finger at Mary and at the man she married in 1567, the Earl of Bothwell. This led to a revolt against Mary, which led her to flee into England in 1568, hoping for sanctuary from her cousin Elizabeth. The problem with this is that Mary had made no secret for the previous 10 years that she believed herself the rightful Queen of England. Elizabeth was a Protestant, which Mary, as a Catholic, found unacceptable, and Elizabeth was, at least according to one way of looking at things, an illegitimate child of Henry's illicit relationship with Anne Boleyn, seen as illicit by most European Catholics. When Mary got to England, rather than giving her aid, Elizabeth had her imprisoned and, in fact, never met her face to face, even though she seems to do so in most of the movies about the period.

Mary quickly became the focus of plots. There was a rebellion in 1569 called the Northern Rebellion that attempted to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. The government uncovered a plot in 1571 called the Ridolfi Plot, which was an attempt to overthrow Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. The same is true of the 1583 Throckmorton Plot. The same is true in 1586 of the so-called Babington Plot. All of these sought to overthrow Elizabeth and to put Mary on the throne, and they had two other things in common. One is that Mary was willingly cooperating with the plotters, and the government eventually got evidence to prove that. The other is that behind the scenes, and often not very far behind the scenes, were Spanish agents and Jesuit priests seeking to put Mary on the throne.

In 1587, after years and years of resisting advice to do so, Elizabeth finally agreed to the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, who was beheaded in 1587 and who immediately became a Catholic martyr. But there's also another importance to the execution of Mary. The number one Catholic in Europe, of course, was Philip II, and for years the Pope and other Catholics had urged Philip II to invade England, not merely to send agents, not merely to work covertly to overthrow Elizabeth, but to invade England, overthrow Elizabeth, and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. But this did not suit Philip II's plans. Philip II did not want to put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne of England. Mary, Queen of Scots, on her mother's side, was related to the Guise family in France, and Philip II despised the Guise family. They might both be Catholics, but they were political rivals, and the last thing that Philip wanted to do was to replace one enemy, Elizabeth, with another enemy, Mary, Queen of Scots. Once she was dead, the possibility then existed that he might put a member of his own family on the throne of England, and that is what encouraged him the following year to attempt an invasion.

Before we get to that invasion, though, we need to look at what's going on in the Netherlands at the time. The Netherlands was made up of 17 provinces that were loosely linked together by the fact that they had all been ruled in the Middle Ages by the Duke of Burgundy. Charles V, as you may recall, was the heir of the Dukes of Burgundy for part of their territory, and that included the Netherlands. So Charles had ruled the 17 provinces of the Netherlands. In fact, he had lived there and was very, very popular there. He also had been fairly lenient with the Netherlands, even when it came to enforcing religious uniformity. He had been lenient compared with what comes afterwards, and he had respected the local rights of the 17 provinces and had not imposed unduly harsh taxation on them. The main thing that linked the 17 provinces of the Netherlands together was that they had a representative institution called the States-General, and Charles had worked with that.

But of course, Charles had stepped down in 1556, and when he did, his son, Philip II of Spain, became the new ruler of the Netherlands. Now, Philip had grown up in Spain. He loved Spain. The Spanish loved him, but he was relatively unknown in the Netherlands, and the people there did not care for him. They especially did not care for the fact that he began to impose very restrictive policies on them almost as soon as he became their ruler. Now, before we proceed to those policies, I need to tell you something else about those 17 provinces. Roughly speaking, we can divide them into North and South. In fact, the northern provinces are what nowadays in 2011 are the United Provinces of the Netherlands, or as we sometimes call it, Holland. In Philip's day, these provinces spoke Dutch. They were largely involved economically in commerce and banking, and most of them had converted to Calvinism. The southern provinces, which nowadays form the nation of Belgium, were French-speaking, they were Catholic, and their activities tended to be agricultural or involved with manufacturing, manufacturing by hand. So you have two groups of provinces that differ in terms of language, religion, and economic activity. It would take a lot to get all 17 to work together. One of the wonders of Philip's reign is that he makes them do that, at least temporarily, with his policies.

Now, because Philip spent most of his time in Spain, he was not on hand to rule the Netherlands, and so he delegated authority there early on to his half-sister, a woman named Margaret of Parma, who was an illegitimate daughter of his father, Charles V. She became the governor of the Netherlands from 1559 until 1567. She worked very closely in conjunction with a churchman, Cardinal Granvelle, who was her both her chief minister politically and the most powerful ecclesiastical figure in the Netherlands, and the two of them together became instruments of Philip's policy. Both of them took a very dim view of allowing much freedom to the provinces or to the Estates-General, and they found themselves entrusted with enforcing two very unpopular policies. One is that Philip sent the Spanish Inquisition to the Netherlands and began a process of persecuting non-Catholics. The other was that Philip imposed very harsh taxation on the Netherlands and tended to do this by going over the heads of the States-General, which was used to having a say in such matters. Therefore, there was opposition. Quite a few individuals came to oppose Philip's minions, Parma and Granvelle, but as it turns out, the most important of them was a man named William, sometimes called William of Orange because he came from the House of Orange-Nassau, Orange being territory he owned in France, and also sometimes known as William the Silent, not not because he didn't speak, but because he kept things very close to the vest. He was very guarded about his diplomacy and his plans and what have you. He owned land in France, he owned land in Germany, he owned land in the Netherlands, and he was a very influential figure, uh, even before the trouble started in the northern part of the Netherlands.

Well, what triggered the Dutch Revolt was that Philip's minions began enforcing his policies with greater and greater harshness, and this fell particularly heavily on Calvinists in the cities who found themselves being restricted religiously at the same time that they were having to pay higher taxes. And violence broke out in the Netherlands in 1566 in a wave of iconoclasm and a tax on government officials called the Calvinist Fury, in which Calvinists went into a number of Catholic churches and destroyed the icons there, which they regarded as idolatrous, and also attacked government officials. Both Margaret of Parma and Granvelle eventually stepped down in 1567 as a result of this trouble, and in their place, Philip II sent another relative, the Duke of Alba, to serve as the new governor of the Netherlands.

Now, if Margaret of Parma and Granvelle had seemed harsh, they must have seemed downright gentle after a few years of the Duke of Alba. He immediately set up a council to root out the rebels and heretics, which came to be known by his Dutch Calvinist enemies as the Council of Blood. There continued to be resistance. In fact, there was open warfare between the Spanish troops that Alba brought and the Dutch who resisted him, both on land and increasingly at sea, with a naval force that came to be known somewhat ironically as the Sea Beggars, taking an insult that the Spanish used against the Dutch and turning it into a badge of pride. Alba stepped down as governor in 1573 and went on to do other things. He was replaced by Louise de Requesens, who was governor from 1573 to 1576, and who actually died on the job.

Now, one of the problems that happened in the Netherlands is that the Spanish soldiers there were not paid very frequently, and this meant that life for them became extremely harsh because they were expected to feed and clothe themselves out of their own pay. One of the odd things about the Spanish campaign against the Dutch Revolt is that mutiny became almost a form of negotiation. The soldiers would simply refuse to fight until they were paid, and all would be worked out, they would be paid, and they would go back to fighting. But around the time of Requesens' death in 1576, they had not been paid for a very long time, and they reached the breaking point and went on a rampage in the city of Antwerp, looting the city, tearing it up pretty thoroughly in what came to be known as the Spanish Fury. Ultimately, Philip II was forced to pay them, but the damage had been done. This had incensed the Dutch Calvinists even more, and this meant that there was even fiercer resistance to the Spanish than there had been prior to the so-called Spanish Fury.

Well, the next governor that Philip sent was the Duke of Parma, the son of Margaret of Parma, who would be there from 1578 to 1592 and would play an important part not only in dealing with the Dutch Revolt but also in the Anglo-Spanish War. Now, around 1579, something of great significance happened in the Netherlands. At one point, the Spanish had become so unpopular that even the southern Catholic, French-speaking Belgian provinces had been in opposition to Philip II. But by 1579, there was a combination of things that led them to change course. One was the formidable presence of Parma. The other was that they were becoming worried about the influence of the Dutch Calvinists to the north. So in 1579, several provinces in the southern part of the Netherlands, in the Catholic south of the Netherlands, created a union called the Union of Arras, and the same provinces that are part of the Union of Arras remain part of what we later call the Spanish Netherlands, and even later, the nation of Belgium. In response to this, the northern provinces created something called the Union of Utrecht, and those same provinces are what eventually become independent as the Protestant United Provinces of the Netherlands. In 1581, the Union of Utrecht swore something called the Oath of Abjuration, in which they formally and officially rejected the authority of Philip II.

Now, at this juncture, they had no notion of trying to go on without a leader of some kind, and one of the first individuals that they approached about leadership was the French Duke of Anjou, or Alençon, as he had been the younger brother of the French King Henry III, who actually accepted without thinking it through very much, arrived in the Netherlands with the notion of becoming the governor-general or perhaps more of the Union of Utrecht, and who brought troops with him who were not paid and who eventually went on a rampage in 1583 known as the French Fury and left the Dutch totally disenchanted with the French, causing the Duke of Anjou and Alençon to go home, where he shortly thereafter died, meaning, of course, that Henry III had no heir.

One of the most important events in the whole history of the Dutch Revolt came in 1584, when an agent named Balthasar Gérard, who was covertly working for Philip II, assassinated William the Silent. Balthasar Gérard had posed as a servant, as a Protestant, as loyal to William and the Dutch Calvinists, and had managed to work his way into the inner circle of William, all the time working as a secret agent for Spain. One of the things that is very significant about this assassination is that it is the first assassination in history of a major political figure involving the use of a handgun. Balthasar Gérard shot William with a pistol. It's an old wheel-lock pistol, a very, very primitive pistol by today's standards, but what made this so significant is the pistol is small, he was able to conceal it inside his coat until he was very, very close to William and was able to shoot him, uh, you know, without any chance of missing whatsoever. Not only did this kill the leader of the Dutch Calvinists, it sent a wave of terror throughout Europe at the time because of their very real possibility that other assassins might use the same methods. And indeed, other would-be assassins tried. There was an attempt a few years later against Elizabeth I of England, which failed, but that involved the use of a pistol. This, this sort of changed the whole nature of security around kings and other rulers because of the greater danger of being assassinated in this manner.

Another thing, though, was that this, this sent a wave of rage through Protestant countries like England and made them more determined than ever to resist Philip II and the forces of Catholicism. This is in 1584. Now, William was followed as the leader of the Dutch Calvinists by his son, Maurice of Nassau, who remained an important figure well into the 17th century and who proved to be a very able leader. But the Dutch still wanted outside help, and they turned to the most logical place, asking their Protestant neighbor across the channel, Elizabeth I. So she sent them troops in 1585, led by one of her most prominent courtiers, a man with whom she had been linked, rightly or wrongly, romantically in her youth, Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. According to the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585, Leicester and the English troops were to go to the aid of the Dutch, and indeed they did so. However, Leicester overreached himself. The Dutch offered him the title of Governor-General. He accepted that title without getting Elizabeth's permission. She was furious, brought him back home, and that was the end of his mission.

In 1586, Maurice of Nassau was joined in leading the Dutch Calvinist revolt against Spain by a man named Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who held the title of Lands Advocate, and between the two of them, they proved to be quite effective leaders. Now, all the time that this is going on, you have the Dutch Revolt against Philip getting assistance, uh, towards the 1580s, from Elizabeth, the Protestant in England. You have the French civil war going on with Elizabeth sending help to the Protestants and Philip at least sympathizing with the Catholics, and you have rising tension between England and Spain as well, not only over religion but also over the colonies. Spain regarded the New World as its territory, with the exception of Brazil, which was recognized as belonging to Portugal, and of course, after 1580, Portugal itself belonged to Spain. So Spain believed that the New World was an entirely Spanish realm. The English had other ideas and had begun to encroach on Spanish territory and had begun to use what are called privateers to do so. Privateers are basically private individuals who prey on the shipping of rivals. Now, if they work for you, they're privateers. If they work for the other guy, they're pirates. So the individuals that Elizabeth regarded as privateers, the Spanish saw as, you know, outlaw pirates.

Of these, the most famous was a man named Sir Francis Drake, about whom there's a great deal of misleading legend and mythology, but who also performed some very important feats. He already had been involved in harassing Spanish shipping and Spanish colonies, but in 1577, he undertook a voyage in which he circumnavigated the entire globe, attacking a number of Spanish ships along the way and letting the Spanish know in no uncertain terms that he could reach them no matter where they were. This began to worry them very, very much. In 1585, he carried out a series of raids on the Spanish treasure fleet and Spanish colonies, which were very damaging to Spain and were one of the principal reasons why in 1585, an unofficial war, an undeclared war, broke out between England and Spain. They were already fighting a proxy war in France, they were already fighting a proxy war in the Netherlands, but in 1585, they went to war with each other.

This war initially was fought primarily at sea, but Philip had in mind to eventually invade England. What held him back, remember, was that he didn't want to invade England, overthrow Elizabeth, and put Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne. So he held off. He also needed money. Well, by 1587, word was out that Philip was making long-term plans for an invasion, and so Drake, with Elizabeth's blessing, took an English fleet down to the Spanish port of Cadiz and launched a devastating raid against Spanish shipping in the harbor there. He later referred to this jokingly as "singeing the King of Spain's beard." What they did was to sink much of the Spanish shipping in Cadiz harbor and therefore deprived the Spanish not only of a great deal of shipping but also of the cargo that was on those ships.

This might seem odd, but the most important damage that they did to the Spanish cause was to sink some ships that were carrying cured barrel staves. Barrel staves are the wooden pieces that are used to make wooden barrels, and if you don't have cured barrel staves, two things will go wrong: one, your barrel will leak if you use green wood, and number two, the contents will often spoil if you use green wood. If the Spanish were to launch a naval attack against England, this would mean being at sea for weeks, if not months. It would mean needing to have water, wine, and food available in barrels, and now the way of carrying most of those things had been undermined. There's no refrigeration, no Ziploc bags, barrels were what you needed. Now, Drake would go on to play an important part in resisting the attempted Spanish invasion. Another individual who was Charles Howard, Lord Howard of Effingham, who became the Lord Admiral in 1588 or 1585, I'm sorry, and who would later on be rewarded for his efforts with the title of Earl of Nottingham. Another figure of importance was John Hawkins, who in 1573 had gone from being a privateer or pirate and a slave trader to being the treasurer of Elizabeth's Navy. Also involved to some extent, although not anywhere near to the extent that you see him in the movies, was Sir Walter Raleigh.

Well, for his part, Philip II had begun thinking as early as 1583 about launching a naval attack against England, of assembling a vast fleet to be called the Armada. 1585, as we've seen, undeclared war had broken out, and Philip began to think much more seriously about how to bring an invasion about. He asked for suggestions from two people: one was the Duke of Parma, his commander in the Netherlands, and the other was the Duke of Santa Cruz, who was the head of the Spanish Navy. Now, what the Duke of Parma favored doing was invading England from the Netherlands, putting troops on barges, floating them across the English Channel, and carrying out a land war against Elizabeth. What the Marquis, not Duke, I said Duke, but the Marquis of Santa Cruz favored doing was invading England by sea.

What Philip did, and and this was a near fatal mistake, was that he combined these two plans into one whereby the Armada was to go to the Netherlands and assist Parma's troops in crossing the channel. Now, one of the things that went wrong with this plan is that before it could be carried out, the Marquis of Santa Cruz died. The most experienced naval commander in Spain was now dead. Philip replaced him with a man known as the Duke of Medina Sidonia, a good soldier and a brilliant man when it came to logistics, to supply, but Medina Sidonia was not a sailor. He had never commanded a naval vessel. In fact, he got seasick whenever he went to sea, and he begged Philip to appoint someone more competent. Philip, however, wanted him because of his skill with logistics and also because he was a Duke and therefore had the stature necessary, so he thought, to command respect. So we have a potentially difficult plan involving both Parma's idea of sending troops across the channel on barges and Santa Cruz's idea of sending an Armada, now commanded by a man with no naval experience.

Now, in one way, the plan did make sense. It would have been difficult for Parma to get troops across the English Channel on barges for two reasons. One reason being the English Navy, which would have done its best to send them all to the bottom of the channel, and the other was the Dutch Sea Beggars, who would have done exactly the same thing. But inherent in this plan is a fundamental problem, and that problem is communication. How is Medina Sidonia on the Armada to communicate with Parma and to work out this very challenging plan so that it works smoothly? The answer, it proved to be, he could not. Of course, there's no radio, there's no telegraph. The only way to communicate with Parma was to send a ship, which the English would do their best to capture, which the Dutch would do their best to capture, and so to some extent, they had to rely upon luck.

The end of July 1588, the Armada entered the English Channel, and Drake and Howard and others began to harass it immediately. One of the advantages the English had was that they got behind the Armada and had what is called the wind gauge. They had the wind working for them rather than against them. Another advantage they had is that the English ships were smaller and faster than the Spanish ships, and on top of that, the English had longer-range guns so that they could fire at the Spanish ships while remaining out of range of Spanish cannon. Still another advantage was that the English had gun carriages that worked very efficiently so that when you fired, the carriage rolled back, making it easy to reload and fire again, whereas in the case of the Spanish, they had to literally lean out over the edge of the ship to load, which was more dangerous and also more time-consuming. The upshot is that the English chased the Armada through the channel. Medina Sidonia made the crucial mistake of deciding to anchor at Calais, and the English sent a half dozen fire ships in among the Spanish fleet. The fire ships didn't actually do any damage, but they panicked the Spanish into leaving the harbor in disarray, which allowed the English to destroy a number of the Spanish ships. Drake, in particular, playing a big role here.

The other thing is that the weather got involved. There was a tremendous storm in the northern part of the channel and the North Sea that sank a great many Spanish ships, and that drove many of them north of Scotland, where more were damaged, then over to Ireland, where still more were damaged, and those ships that were left were only able to limp home. This doesn't mean that the Spanish gave up, but the, the Armada campaign of 1588 was a great morale booster for the English. It convinced them that God was on their side. It convinced them that they had the greatest navy in the world, and it prepared them to continue fighting, which is a good thing. Philip sent another Armada in 1596 in retaliation for yet another Cadiz raid. That year, he sent another Armada in 1597, and his successor, Philip III, sent yet another in 1601. None of these were successful, but the point is that the war continued. The Armada did not end it. The end was not a foregone conclusion.

In the meantime, the war in France had come to an end in 1598 with the Treaty of Vervins, which recognized the Bourbon ruler Henry IV, and things began to wind down a bit in the Netherlands. Philip put his daughter Isabella and her husband, the Archduke Albert of Austria, in in 1598 as joint sovereigns of the Netherlands, and they began looking for ways to make peace with the Dutch rebels, which they would eventually do in 1609, signing something known as the Twelve Years' Truce. Fighting would eventually resume in the Netherlands during the Thirty Years' War, but there would be 12 years of peace first.

Where the English and the Spanish were concerned, Philip II died in 1598, was followed by Philip III. Elizabeth finally died in 1603 and was followed on the throne by the Protestant son of Mary, Queen of Scots, James VI of Scotland, who became James I of England. He and Philip recognized that the Anglo-Spanish War was costing both countries a great deal of money and not accomplishing anything, and so they held a conference in 1604 known as the Somerset Conference, which led to the Treaty of London. So with the French religious wars ending in 1598, the Anglo-Spanish War in 1604, and the signing of the Twelve Years' Truce in 1609, it looked as though religious peace had come to Europe. 1618 would prove that that was not the case.

So Dr. Robinson's lecture on the Dutch Revolt and the Anglo-Spanish War will end our lectures for Unit One. It was extremely interesting to see how these three figures, these three countries, managed to relate and and actually have their rebellions. I found extremely interesting how Philip II played such a key role not only in his home country of Spain but also in the Netherlands, which you've just learned he did not live and he didn't know anything about the Netherlands, and and you've learned that they actually did not like Philip II. They liked his father, Charles V, but did not have, did not want anything pretty much to do with him, at least the northern provinces. You learned how they split in between into a north and a southern province area in the Netherlands, modern-day Netherlands and then modern-day Belgium. But also how Philip played a key role in English history. The fact that he had been married to Elizabeth's sister, Mary, and the fact that he wanted to, um, take over England and put a member of his own family on the English throne, and how he was thwarted and not allowed to do that by Queen Elizabeth I. And it was also extremely interesting that we learned about the different plots that occurred trying to get rid of Elizabeth I, and yet they all failed. All of these plots, numerous plots that were mentioned in this lecture, and yet Elizabeth I managed to die a natural death and had quite a long reign in the process. It was interesting to note Mary, Queen of Scots, not to be confused, please, with Mary, Henry VII's daughter, totally different Mary, different person altogether. She was a cousin, as we've learned from this lecture, but she was a cousin to Elizabeth I, and it was an extremely interesting to learn a little bit about her history. So we also have Scotland thrown into the mix as well with this lecture. So when we come back, we'll begin our Unit Two lectures. Until next time.