EARLY in August 1588, a skirmish took place between the Spanish Armada and the English navy. This seemingly minor battle was, and still is, little recognised; but it changed the course of European history.
Vehemently opposed to the policies of Queen Elizabeth I and incensed by English raids on his treasure ships, King Philip II of Spain had determined to defeat Protestant England. But his strategy, a merging of two competing plans, was fatally flawed.
The navy had proposed a full-scale invasion by sea with a great Armada. The army's plan was for an invasion across the English Channel from the lowlands of Holland, where 30,000 Spanish soldiers were already fighting a war against English and Dutch Protestants.
Philip dithered. Then he merged the two plans into a flawed compromise. The Armada would sail up the English Channel and convey the army in barges from Holland; then together they would capture London.
Popular belief, then and now, is that the Armada was defeated by a combination of a superior English navy and divine intervention - in the form of "Gods wind". But the facts are a good deal more complex.
In late July 1588, the great Armada - a formidable crescent of 130 ships, carrying 26,000 soldiers and sailors - approached the English coast. Its admiral, the Duke of Medina Sidonia, sent messages to the army in Flanders that they were approaching and would arrive within a few days. But communications from Spain to the army had been slow to get through; the army had only recently learned of King Philip's plan. A message came back that the army wasn't ready to embark.
The Armada therefore had to find a safe, deep-water anchorage in the English Channel, where its ships could wait until the army was prepared for the great expedition. Blown by the south-west wind, they sailed slowly up the English Channel.
As they progressed, they were harassed by English warships led by Admiral Lord Howard and Sir Walter Raleigh. They were fewer than the Armada, but smaller and faster. Having opted to bypass Portsmouth, the only remaining option for the Spaniards was to put into the Solent, behind the Isle of Wight. On August 3rd and 4th, in light winds, this they tried to accomplish.
But the English knew what was afoot. In a series of skirmishes, using their local knowledge of the complex tidal streams around the Solent, they nudged the Spaniards towards a hidden and treacherous sandbank, the Owers. By the time the Armada's commanders realised the danger, their only way to escape was to move quickly into deeper water, bypassing the Solent, and sail back out into the English Channel. There was now no safe anchorage between them and the army in Holland. As events would later prove, this was the tipping point.
Some days later, the Armada was forced to anchor in open water off Gravelines, near Calais. Here they were a sitting target for Raleigh's fire-ships. These were released into the tide, to drift down on the Spaniards in the middle of the night.
Such was their terror of fire-ships that the Spaniards cut their anchor cables and fled. In the ensuing battle, the Armada was scattered and forced by the south-west wind out into the North Sea.
At this point the game was up. The army had now been left behind in Holland and the only way home for the Spaniards was to sail around the northern tip of Scotland and then south, down the west coast of Ireland. But their rudimentary maps didn't show the great peninsulas which thrust out from Ireland's west coast into the Atlantic. With no knowledge of longitude and driven onto this jagged coastline by westerly autumn gales, they found themselves caught on lee shores from which there was no escape. In the end only 67 ships and around 10,000 exhausted men made it back to Spain.
The weather which supposedly defeated the Armada - Queen Elizabeth called it "God's wind" - was in fact nothing more than the prevailing south-westerly, which blew the square-riggers of the Armada relentlessly up the English Channel and out into the North Sea. But as God's representative on earth, it suited Elizabeth to claim divine intervention as proof of her right to power.
The engagement at the entrance to the Solent was the crux of the Armada story. Far from being a major sea battle, like Trafalgar centuries later, it appears at first sight to have been little more than a series of skirmishes, with little damage suffered by either side. But by using computers to study the tidal conditions of that day, historians have shown that the English seamen knew exactly what they were doing. Their intimate knowledge of tidal streams around the Solent helped them to deny the Armada a safe anchorage in which it could wait for the Spanish army to be ready.
The English knowledge of their tides and their consequent tactics that day were the pivotal factors in the defeat of the Armada.