In this edition of BBC Radio 4's Things We Forgot To Remember, Michael Portillo takes a closer look at the myths that have obscured the real threats of Spanish invasion of Elizabethan England.

MICHAEL voice piece on coast at Mousehole
Elizabethan England is at war with Catholic Spain, foreign galleons are gathering off England’s coastline, invasion threatens. Then, the cry goes up “armada! – the Spanish are coming!”

A story of the Spanish Armada that we think we’ve remembered. But this Armada put troops ashore on English soil, here where I’m standing on a rocky Cornish beach. There was no Drake calmly ending his game of bowls, no providential winds to blow away the invaders, and no cunning English fire ships scattered them. Here patriotic resistance crumbled into a shambles.

This was one of the Spanish Armadas that we’ve conveniently forgotten to remember – part of a war that lasted 18 years and brought the nation to the edge of ruin. Why do we remember one Armada and not the others? Was England really victorious in the Armada that we do commemorate? Myth or reality, history or propaganda – we can miss a lot in the smoke of battle and lose more in the pages of history.

MUSIC Hombres victoria Francisco Guerrero (1528-1599)

MONTAGE (OVER MUSIC)

READING In vain the Spanish ocean roared
Its billows swelled against our shore
Its billows sunk beneath thy word
With all the floating war thy bore

MICHAEL When the Englishman Isaac Watts wrote those words into his hymn, a hundred and twenty-one years had already passed since the defeat of the Spanish Armada that we all do know about. Beatified in our historical imagination, the events of July 1588 in the Channel still resonate with the English to this day. God was on the English side, the Protestant winds blew and the cool-headed courage of our military commanders saved the nation. It’s the stuff of legends.

LAMBERT (still over music) There are few more iconic moments in English history than the Armada. It’s about daring English pluck. It’s about the little guys beating the big guys. The Spanish Armada a massive force, a huge and overwhelming force of vast vessels manned by the crack Spanish troops of Philip the Second that was going to sail up the Channel and pick an army in what’s now Belgium and drop them on the coast, depose Queen, put in some Catholic Monarch and put us all back under the Pope. Truly dreadful fate.

MUSIC (Note ends, sack butt deflates…)

LAMBERT … pretty much none of that is true!

MICHAEL Really? Well, you certainly don’t need Andrew Lambert, Professor of Naval History at King’s College London, or me to tell you about the myth of the 1588 Armada – if you’re English, some knowledge of it is almost genetic.

In this series of programmes I’m looking again at some of the cornerstone events in history that we think we all remember so well, to ask: “Was it really as simple as that? Are we the victims of centuries of propagandists, both historians and politicians, who take charge of our history to sell us bowdlerised versions of the past, designed to puff up our patriotism?”

I was a politician long enough to know the value of a good news story. There’s nothing better than a victory. But in the case of the Spanish Armada the myth of the English win is more clear-cut than the facts would strictly allow.

FELIPE Myths are always more important than facts in history.

MICHAEL Armada historian, Felipe Fernandez-Armesto…

FELIPE …much of has been distorted by the spin, as we now call it, that the masters of propaganda put on it.

DORAN It’s become part of a national myth.

MICHAEL Dr Susan Doran is a lecturer in Elizabethan History at Christ Church, Oxford.

DORAN Then of course this myth it’s continued right the way through British history when we faced a threat from Napoleon, when we faced a threat from the Nazis, and probably now when we face the threat from the European Union, so it’s really enshrined in the way that many people in England see their country’s history.

MICHAEL For the majority of the period between the 1590s and the present, the story of the Armada has been told and re-told as the premier example of how the devout English were saved by their Protestant God.

FELIPE The myth was already in place before the battle was joined, because both sides did represent this encounter as something on which the fate of Europe would hinge. Of course that was all, you know, rhetoric and bombast, it wasn’t true at all, it’s like most of what politicians say before wars, you know you shouldn’t believe a word of it. So when the campaign was over people looked for ways in which to fulfil these um expectations.

DORAN People believed that they were taking part in something of vital importance in history, and I say that because there were all these kind of commemoration artefacts that were produced and bought, like fireguards with pictures of the Armada on them on, and pictures being produced, there were cushions, there were books, a whole range of materials that celebrated the victory of the Armada.

MICHAEL Elizabethan folk patriotically buying their commemorative Armada memorabilia, to be admired or stowed, rather as we second Elizabethans have done with so many Charles and Diana wedding mugs.

MUSIC Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home (lute solo) John Dowland (1563-1626)

MICHAEL Fairytales fit onto cushions, fireguards and mugs. Real history does not.

MUSIC Lord Willoughby's Welcome Home (lute solo) John Dowland (1563-1626)

MICHAEL The truth about the Spanish Armada is more complicated and less glorious than either the Elizabethans or generations since, have been led to believe. The reasons for the Armada, the nature of the English Navy’s “decisive” victory over it and the subsequent decade and a half of war, with its ensuing multiple-Armadas, have all been glossed over or conveniently lost in time.

Where to begin to remember the things that we have forgotten? Well, perhaps the first iconic image of the great struggle is Sir Francis Drake and his astonishing sang froid.

FX BOWLS Well done, good shot Peter, that was very good that was, another round the back next time!!

MICHAEL In their bright green blazers, Peter Marsh and his team mates at the Sir Francis Drake Bowling Club in Plymouth, carry on the traditional sport of their Elizabethan patron. As I found out, the story of Drake and the Armada is part of their received wisdom.

BOWLERS Well he was playing bowls at the time and the er Spanish Armada was coming up behind the south west wind, and someone told him that we should now set sail to deal with the Spaniards, and he said we’ve got time to finish the game and beat the Spaniards.

MICHAEL By the way how long might that have been? How long might it take to finish a game do you think?

BOWLERS It takes about two and a half hours.

MICHAEL Two and half hours…

BOWLERS Hours, yes.

MICHAEL So he really was being pretty laid back if this were true…

BOWLERS Oh yes.

RODGER I think it’s very largely a myth which was established, at least made popular in the nineteenth century when it corresponded to a certain ideal of the way that English gentlemen are supposed to behave. Whether Drake was a gentleman is a distinctly dubious question. He’s really of course the most distinguished of the English pirates co-opted into the national war effort. We can be quite certain that if by any chance he was playing bowls on Plymouth Hoe the moment that the English scouting ship came running in to Plymouth Sound, he didn’t stay for long because the situation was actually acutely dangerous.

MICHAEL Prof Nicolas Rodger, Naval Historian at Exeter University. Well what if Drake was a pirate and didn’t play bowls? We are still keen to ensure that our children recall his heroic achievement in defeating the Spanish.

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