The Failure of Elizabeth I’s English Armada

Commercial interests often have a place in war, from the sales of dead soldiers’ teeth after Waterloo to the possible connection between the Iraq War and Big Oil. However, no war was as blatantly commercial as that waged by the English Armada of 1589, paid for by a 16th-century version of crowd funding.

‘English Armada’ is not a mistake: capitalising on Spanish weakness following the Spanish Armada of 1588, Elizabeth I and her advisers considered how to obliterate any chance of a repeat performance. Only about 50 of Spain’s ships had managed to limp home after the attempted invasion of England and many of these were in a bad state, needing repair in northern Spain. Sending an English Armada to these ports could decimate all attempts to rebuild Spain’s navy. The English Armada planned to then continue on to Lisbon and challenge the power of Philip II there. 

Portuguese designs

Portugal was the pre-eminent European power in India and much of South-East Asia. It had been an important English ally until an internal succession crisis led to Philip II gaining the throne and annexing Portugal into Spain’s empire. In 1589, Don Antonio, a pretender to the Portuguese throne and an illegitimate grandson of the last king of Portugal but two, was living in exile in England and surviving by selling off the Portuguese crown jewels. If the English Armada could install Don Antonio on the throne, Portugal would again be an independent country and an English ally. This would be simple to achieve, as it was widely believed that the pretender had only to step foot in Portugal and a nation eagerly awaiting his return would rise up against the Spanish.

Privateer and national hero to the English, infidel and ‘La Dragontea’ to the Spanish, Francis Drake was personally acquainted with Don Antonio and believed that the Portuguese were ready and waiting for a new king, however uncharismatic Don Antonio might be in person. Drake planned an audacious scheme: in one operation, they would engineer an uprising in Portugal, destroy the last remnants of the Spanish fleet at A Coruña and take the Azores, crucial stopovers for Atlantic seafaring. Drake would lead the navy, while a ruthless soldier, John Norris – known as Black Jack Norris – would lead military operations. It was a wildly ambitious plan that would restart Anglo-Portuguese trade, cripple Spanish naval power and give England control of territory en route to the Americas, the source of Spanish silver and much of its wealth. All they needed was funding for the enterprise.

Unfortunately, Elizabeth’s treasure chests had been exhausted by long support for the Dutch war against Spain, a painful slog in the mud and seaways of the Netherlands that had been ongoing for the last 20 years. Added to this were the extraordinary expenses of fighting off the Spanish Armada the previous year. She was unable to raise the revenue for the outlay on ships, men and provisions needed to launch an English Armada. Drake needed to look elsewhere for funding, but the Dutch United Provinces were similarly exhausted by war. There were plenty of wealthy private citizens to be found in both countries, many of whom he knew personally, but none of them were so extravagantly well-breeched or so foolhardy as to finance an entire war from their own pockets.

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Drake and Norris instead proposed a new and surprising way of funding this war: subscription. Private citizens and guilds could contribute in return for a share of expected profit from captured Iberian territories and ships. Elizabeth would be one of many subscribers: she agreed to contribute £20,000 towards a total budget of £70,000, alongside ‘six of her second sort of ships’. The Dutch agreed to provide one eighth of this money, alongside troop transports and men. The rest, just over £40,000, was made up by private subscription. Subscribers were drawn to the idea of a quick profit and were encouraged by Drake’s earlier successful privateering expeditions, in which he had taken Spanish galleons loaded with silver, spices, porcelain and glossy lacquerware: valuable commodities that could be sold for enormous profits. 

Like other voyages headed by the Levant, Muscovy or East India companies to India, China, Russia and the coasts of North Africa, the English Armada was floated as a joint-stock company. Subscribers would own part of the Armada’s stock and could buy and sell it as they liked. These shares could not be traded on a stock market per se, but it was a small world in terms of potential investors and shares could be sold from person to person. 

Most investors were friends or acquaintances of Drake or Norris, with the former investing at least £2,000 of his own money. Most were also investors in other kinds of joint-stock ventures. Sir George Barnes, for example, was a stockholder in the Muscovy Company and had funded its attempt in 1553 to find a north-west passage to China (the venture failed, but they did reach Russia). Other investors, such as Robert Flick, wanted to renew their formerly profitable trade with Portugal, while yet more were interested in trade with Brazil, India and China. Others may have had a personal stake in Spanish defeat: the merchant and investor Richard Staper’s son had died in the Mediterranean, after his persecution by the Spanish Inquisition.

Staper’s frequent trading partner Sir Edward Osborne had an interest in every possible area of the Armada’s new trade routes. A second son, he was apprenticed to a wealthy cloth merchant, William Hewett, rising to become Hewett’s heir after rescuing his daughter Anne from drowning in the Thames. Osborne was one of the first English traders to experiment with exporting cloth to Spain and Portugal, helping to set up the Company of Spain and Portugal in 1577, which also opened up trade to Brazil. He moved from there into the Baltic and Russian trade, exporting cloths and kerseys (a coarser, lighter-weight wool weave) to the Hanseatic port of Danzig. But there was another huge and untapped market for cloth: Turkey. Sponsoring a mission there, Osborne was instrumental in opening up trade with the Levant, exporting tin, lead and cloth in return for silks, currants, spices and cotton.

Finally, Osborne looked towards India, importing the luxurious and expensive spices and silks available in Bombay. He sponsored the investigation of a land route over Europe and Asia to India, with the trader John Newberry disguised as a Muslim merchant. Osborne controlled a vast network of commodities trade over sea and land, sponsoring explorers and ambassadors to reach new territories and make new deals.

Can it work?

The revival of trade with Portugal would have represented a huge coup for the British cloth trade, particularly as Portugal also controlled Brazil and parts of India and Indonesia. Like Drake’s other raids, however, the English Armada was also expected to bring back short-term wealth: a cache of richly laden Spanish ships, preferably carrying Mexican silver or Indian cottons and Chinese silks.

The joint-stock company looked like the perfect proposition: a major blow to the power of Spain with relatively little outlay from Elizabeth and much of the precarious burden of war displaced onto private citizens, who expected a good return on their investment. But can a crowd-funded war really work? Do stock markets and Armadas make good bedfellows? In the case of the English Armada, the answer would appear to be a resounding ‘no’. There was nothing wrong with Drake and Norris’ calculations: £70,000 would provide 26 warships, with soldiers, artillery, transports, sailors and rations enough for four months’ campaigning around the Iberian peninsula. Elizabeth paid £3,000 of her share early, to encourage other subscribers to pay up.

Armada unravels

At this point, however, the English Armada began to unravel. First, there were delays in getting Dutch and English troops out of the United Provinces, with fierce disputes on both sides as commanders feared being left in undermanned garrisons, easy prey to the vast Spanish force that had been gathered for the invasion of England the previous year and was now turned against the Dutch. Once the troops had been moved back and forth to everyone’s satisfaction and were finally mustered at Plymouth, contrary winds kept them in port. Finally, the rank-and-file English troops were so excited about the prospect of fighting the Spanish and taking booty for themselves that local conscripts streamed into Plymouth, wanting to join the expedition. In a sense, the fighting too had become crowd-funded, with men self-selecting to become part of this prestigious expedition. Norris and Drake felt that they could not say no to any of these enthusiastic would-be fighters but rations that had been procured for a much smaller force were consumed at a terrifying rate. 

Underestimating costs is a pitfall common to similar crowd-funded campaigns and before leaving Plymouth the Armada was already £26,000 over budget. Elizabeth was forced to pick up the shortfall and the much delayed English Armada set off for the Iberian Peninsula with three weeks’ rations aboard. 

Incorrect intelligence saw the Armada attack the almost deserted Galician port of A Coruña in northern Spain, rather than the Cantabrian city of Santander, where Philip’s ships were being repaired. After being driven back from A Coruña, they abandoned this part of the plan and sailed towards Portugal. Hoping to gather support along the way, land and naval forces split. Norris’ army marched 40 miles across hostile territory with no baggage train to get to Lisbon. Many of the volunteers died on the way: at one point, a group of soldiers welcomed a group of Spaniards and Portuguese crying ‘Long live the King Don Antonio’ into their company and promptly had their throats cut. In fortified Lisbon, the Spanish laughed at the ineffective force. In an act of bravado, the Earl of Essex thrust his spear into Lisbon’s gates, but his challenge was not taken up and no supporters of Don Antonio emerged from the city to bolster the English army. Drake appears to have lost interest at this point. It was perhaps concern about returning empty-handed to the expedition’s more prestigious subscribers that led him to look for booty rather than support the land forces besieging Lisbon. 

The final objective – the capture of the Azores – was abandoned because of contrary winds and disease aboard the fleet. The English and Dutch force packed up and sailed home, with only £30,000 of plunder. The whole expedition was a heavy blow to Drake’s reputation: on returning to England, he was accused of cowardice by angry backers.

The lack of return on investment discouraged such ambitious joint-stock ventures for some time and meant that Philip was able to launch a fighting navy again. Successive Spanish Armadas were considered in retaliation, though plans never got off the ground. England remained safe from invasion for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign, despite the disastrous failure of the English Armada.

Sophie Shorland is a former research fellow at the University of Warwick and researches historical geopolitics.