MICHAEL Well, huddled for shelter under the harbour wall on a rocky beach at Mousehole, I’m joined by historian Margaret Perry. What numbers did they come in?

MARGARET PERRY Two hundred armed trained men, and they fired the village.

MICHAEL They set fire to all the houses?

MARGARET PERRRY All the houses. In the Spanish Captain’s account of the raid he says that they were faced with a formidable force of men, but in fact that would have been totally untrue. Richard Carew, who wrote a survey of Cornwall in1603, and he would have had a firsthand account, and he said that the, the men were cowards, they ran from the scene, and I really don’t blame them because they had very little in the way of arms.

MICHAEL So what had the defeat of the Armada in 1588 achieved if it hadn’t given us a sense of security?

MARGARET PERRY Do you know I don’t think it achieved very much at all. I’m sorry I find, find it difficult to answer that one.

MICHAEL Now whether one regards it as cowardice in the face of the enemy or just plain commonsense to withdraw in front of overwhelming forces, the reaction of most was to scarper, but there was an isolated incidence of resistance, and I think we should go and look at that which is up the hill I think.

Well this is really a magnificent house, much bigger than anything else we see in the village.

MARGARET PERRY This is the house that Jenkin Kegwin built in the middle of the sixteenth century.

MICHAEL So Jenkin Kegwin is one of the leading citizens of Mousehole in 1595. How does he react to the invasion of the Spanish?

MARGARET PERRY He was killed, probably by a musket ball. It’s believed that he was defending his home against the Spaniards, possibly also he might, as he traded with the Mediterranean ports, he might have thought that he could perhaps negotiate and try to arrive at some compromise.

MICHAEL If he thought that he was wrong, because he, he finished up dead…

MARGARET PERRY Indeed he did.

MICHAEL When you look back on this have you ever wondered to yourself in view of the very limited resistance that there was here in Mousehole, if in 1588 the Spanish had managed to land in England do you think the English would have put up a magnificent resistance or do you have your doubts about that?

MARGARET PERRY No I mean I’m English, I’d like to think that they put up a magnificent resistance, but you, you’ve nothing really much with to arm yourself. Even the men who would have had arms they would probably just have had a pike or a bow perhaps.

MICHAEL So when the chronicler Carew says that there was cowardice, you think that’s a bit harsh do you?

MARGARET PERRY He probably felt slightly ashamed, perhaps he felt we should have put up more resistance.

MICHAEL Maybe it’s one of the reasons it’s become a thing that we’ve forgotten to remember.

MARGARET PERRY We ain’t forgotten it down here mind you, but yes I think that possibly it is, it doesn’t cover us with glory like the Armada does it, no.

MUSIC

FELIPE I’m pretty confident that with a Spanish Army of any dimensions on the soil of England the English would have given up. The history of England does shows that although it’s a very hard country to invade by sea for reasons of geography essentially, it’s once you do invade it resistance tends to crumble. Even in the sixteenth century the English were already, you know, foreshadowing their future as a polite and commercial nation and weren’t much given to risking their prosperity by brutal and disruptive wars in their own homeland.

MICHAEL The expedition to Mousehole had shown how vulnerable to invasion England was, but the meteorological problems encountered by the Armadas that preceded and followed it convinced Phillip the Second not to stop in his attempts to invade England, but to change tactics. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto.

FELIPE The reason why England is so hard to invade is that all its ports are protected against the wind, except those on the West coast, and what they’re protected by Ireland, and if you control Ireland then you can still always have the advantage of the wind if you’ve got ships in Irish ports, and I think that’s really why the English Monarchy in the age of sail was always so anxious to have Ireland under its control. I mean had the Spaniards conquered Ireland they would certainly have been relatively easily able to coerce the English into a favourable peace.

MUSIC ROISIN DUBH (DARK ROSHEEN)

MICHAEL Dark Rosheen, a sixteenth century folk song calling for the Spanish to come and save Ireland. And come they did.

This final invasion Armada was dispatched to Kinsale on the west coast of Ireland and landed successfully with three and half thousand men under the command of Juan d’Aguila. The strategy here was to meet up with the Irish rebels to harry Lord Charles Mountjoy’s forces in the West of Ireland, and to secure it as a base for a future invasion of the mainland. Mountjoy went on to prevent the rebels and the Spanish converging.

By December, his army was inflicting casualties on the Spanish forces and on the second of January, D’Aguila was forced to sue for terms and return to Spain as the weather cleared in March.

The defeat of this Armada is a part of the Tudor policy towards Ireland that we choose to forget.

But by 1601, Elizabethans looked back with enormous pride on the events of 1588, and it’s from that period that we get our romanticised view of the Armada and England’s valiant defenders. But if the real battle was settled as much by good fortune as by good seamanship and hadn’t proved decisive in the war, why have the Elizabethans and subsequent generations signed up for the myth? Andrew Lambert.

LAMBERT We have to remember that the Elizabethan State is a very powerful propaganda organisation, and the men running the State behind the scenes, men like Burghley and Walsingham, these are very powerful men; they’re very well connected; they’re able to put together a propaganda offensive. There’s a great mass of printed literature, cheap broadsides, cartoons, caricatures. Then there are the State functions. The Queen goes to St Paul’s to celebrate this event on three occasions. On the final occasion in November 1588, is a triumph based on Mantegna’s Triumph of Caesar, the great profession, a kind of imperial procession of victory to the great church of St Paul’s to celebrate the victory and to lay up the captured enemy emblems, in a perfect demonstration of just what a great imperial State England had become..

MICHAEL Amongst the bric-a-brac of Elizabethan propaganda invented after the Armada, the most memorable item is The Queen’s speech at Tilbury on the eve of the Armada. Search your imagination and you’ll find it goes something like this…

ELIZABETH I's WORDS I know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too.

MICHAEL It’s difficult to be English and not feel a certain stiffening of sinew at those well-crafted words. But as with so much of the history that makes up a national identity, it’s almost certainly a fraud. Susan Doran

DORAN We don’t know that Elizabeth actually used those words at all. We do not have a contemporary printed account of what Elizabeth said. We have a draft, early seventeenth century manuscript, which does give those words, but whether they were a draft of what Elizabeth said, whether it was what somebody had written down afterwards, we just don’t know. As the speech was not printed we also can be sure that not very many people, certainly not many Elizabethans, knew what she said.

MICHAEL It’s certainly true that in wartime, myths and legends are born – heroes venerated and leaders feted. But for a myth that is the product of so much political spin to have passed intact down the centuries is extraordinary. Why do we remember it in the way that we do? Felipe Fernandez-Armesto:

FELIPE It came to occupy a place in what historians call the Whig interpretation of English history, the notion that English history is a progressive one and, and consists of a story unfolding towards ever greater liberty, a confessional diversity, constitutional freedom, and the Armada although it had nothing to do with any of those things really, but the Armada did lend itself to being characterised in that way.

MICHAEL A view of our past that extends within, and even onto, the walls of Westminster…

LAMBERT The Armada enters the popular consciousness in 1588, but it remains central to the way the English and later British State thinks of itself, because a great series of tapestries were commissioned by Lord Howard, the Admiral commanding, and by 1660 they were in the House of Lords. The whole of the House of Lords’ debating chamber was surrounded by a mass of beautiful tapestries on a very large scale, depicting the whole conduct of the Armada campaign, and those tapestries were the backdrop to British political life until the eighteen thirties when they were destroyed with the old House of Lords. With the Armada you’re getting the reason why we can still hold our heads up and call ourselves English.

MICHAEL We may now smile about the historical inaccuracies contained within the English myth of the Spanish Armada. But national myths become powerful factors in subsequent political events. I often wonder how strong an influence Drake’s cool-headed example was on the British as alone they resisted Hitler, and whether Churchill’s speeches consciously echoed Queen Elizabeth’s address to her troops at Tilbury. If it’s true that the English weather did more to repel the Spanish than Drake did, perhaps then he played a bigger part in saving Britain in the 1940s than he really did in 1588. The creation of a national myth.

Further Reading

Felippe Fernandez-Armesto The Spanish Armada: The Experience of War in 1588 (Oxford University Press, 1988)
The clash between naval powers

Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, (eds) The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1992)
A selection of essays on the way that historical myths are created and deployed.

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