SPANISH ARMADA

from "The Distillery Channel Journal" November 2020 Issue | Vol.8

THE NEXT TASTE ON TOUR

Spanish Armada What Difference Did It Make? ALL the Difference Written By: Robert Mills

Hinge Points in History – Instances Where One Man, or a Single Event, Changed the Course of History

There have been moments in history where a single determined person, battle, or natural event, forced destiny down one path instead of another, an event which forever changed what occurred afterward. This article, the third in a series for "The Distillery Channel", explores another example of history shaping phenomena.

The Protestant Wind – How the Failure of this Spanish Armada Enshrined Religious and Political Tolerance as Defining Values of Western Civilization

In 1588, King Phillip II of Spain finished building the Spanish Armada, the vast naval fleet of 130 ships he intended to use to invade England. Financed by the prodigious quantities of silver pouring in from the New World, Phillip’s ambitions were breathtakingly sweeping. He sought no less than to hang Queen Elizabeth, the leading proponent of Protestantism, subjugate the English, and crush Protestantism - not only in England but throughout the world. With the immense Armada, Phillip II now had the military wherewithal to achieve this history altering objective.

The English watched in horror as the massive invasion of their island was being readied, but they were anything but passive. They frantically scavenged thru churches and castles, grabbing and melting down anything made of lead for cannon balls. They raced to build barriers and defensive positions all along the invasion route up the Thames river to Buckingham Palace. Simultaneously, Sir Francis Drake and other English privateers launched daring preemptive attacks using fire ships (unmanned ships set afire and aimed directly into the Spanish fleet while it was vulnerable at anchor) and nighttime raids to sink and burn many Armada ships. They attacked them while they were still in port, first in Lisbon and then again in France, where the Armada had sailed to take on soldiers for the invasion.

When the huge Armada, its Galleons now laden with soldiers, horses, and cannon for the invasion, at last ventured out into the English Channel bound for England, it was set upon by Queen Elizabeth’s outnumbered, but fiercely determined navy. In the ensuing historic naval Battle of Gravelines, the more maneuverable English warships and their superior naval guns sank still more of the lumbering Spanish Galleons. In the midst of this ferocious fight, a powerful Southwest wind suddenly arose, pushing the Armada eastward away from England. The winds grew so strong that they threatened to run the entire Armada aground on the Dutch coast.

At this point, the Spanish made the fateful decision to call off the invasion and return to Spain by sailing north, counterclockwise, around the British Isles. When the Armada reached the Scottish coast, it was struck by yet another even more ferocious storm, this one roaring out of the North Sea. Hurricane winds from the north, which historians called “the Protestant Wind”, devastated the Armada, crashing many of its ships into the jagged rocky shores of Scotland where they were torn to pieces by raging surf. When the hapless Spanish sailors and soldiers tried to swim ashore, they were savagely set upon and slaughtered on the beaches by the local populace. The Armada ultimately lost a staggering 20,000 sailors and soldiers, and what was left of it limped back to Spain defeated.

Had the Armada succeeded in landing its thousands of troops on English soil, it would likely have been able to overthrow Queen Elizabeth and absorb both England and the Netherlands into the Spanish Empire. Phillip II had long made clear he intended to use this victory to join with the Pope and the other Catholic countries in seeking to crush Protestantism in Europe, suppress science and religious dissent, and enforce rigid Catholic orthodoxy throughout the world.

I. How the Failure of the Spanish Armada Led to the Adoption by Both Catholics and Protestants Alike of the Radical New Doctrine of Tolerance

At the time the Armada set sail, with the exception of the gigantic Armada itself, the Protestant and Catholic forces throughout Europe were roughly evenly matched. Had the Armada succeeded in its mission of subjugating England, by far the richest and most powerful of the Protestant nations, that would have put the Catholic forces in a position to impose their will on all the Protestants and end the Great Catholic-Protestant Schism by returning Europe to Catholic orthodoxy.

Instead of a decisive Catholic victory, however, the Armada’s defeat returned the two Christian sects to their earlier positions of roughly equal strength, each being unable to impose their will on the other side. However, both Sects viewed the other’s practices and interpretations of Scripture as not just wrong, but so intolerable and offensive that the will of God commanded both sides to make unrestrained all-out religious war against the other’s heresy, a fight to the death if necessary.

And for generations that is exactly what each side pursued, again and again, by all means available.

But the inability of either side to gain sufficient dominance to win this dispute consigned both Catholics and Protestants in Europe to seemly endless bloody and inconclusive religious warfare. This futile slaughter reached its apex during the Thirty Years War from 1618-1648 when, in a frenzy of sectarian violence, Catholic and Protestant villages set in upon each other with swords, hacking even women and children to death. By the time these murderous rampages ebbed in 1648, a staggering one half of the entire population of what is now Germany lay dead. And these horrors were not limited to Germans. Throughout Europe, the Thirty Years War left widespread death and destruction.

At this point, a painful reality began to dawn on both Catholics and Protestants alike -victory in its traditional sense was unattainable. Had either side been able to achieve hegemony, things would have turned out entirely differently. But in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, no matter how ruthlessly or determinedly either side continued this vicious and bloodthirsty religious war, they lacked the resources to be able to defeat or otherwise impose their will on the other side. The continued resort to violence only guaranteed further futile slaughter.

This painful realization ultimately forced both sides to adopt a new and radical idea, one that they had resisted for centuries and which was totally at odds with traditional values -the doctrine of tolerance -the notion that people could peacefully coexist while adhering to deeply conflicting religious views.

Prior to this, essentially the whole world, including even the Catholic and Protestant belligerents themselves, adhered to what are called “Honor Culture” values, meaning that neither dissent nor differing practices were tolerated, especially on religious matters or against established authority. In an Honor Culture, those who dissent, or protest are viewed as dishonoring their culture and its leaders. Honor Cultures believe that they have a moral obligation to silence, jail, or kill those who dishonor their culture by dissent or protest. The new doctrine of tolerance completely reversed this outlook. As this change gained widespread acceptance, it profoundly altered the way that the nations who adopted it handled not only internal religious and political differences, but even scientific discoveries.

III. How the Absence of Tolerance Would Have Profoundly Altered the Modern World.

One of the most important impacts that intolerance would have had on Western Civilization is illustrated by what its impact would have been on science. During the 16th and 17th Centuries, the new scientific disciplines of astronomy and physics were rapidly developing. As new scientific discoveries began to become known, such as heliocentrism (that the earth revolves around the sun), the Honor Culture of the Catholic Church, backed by the powerful monarchies of Spain, Portugal, began to feel that its monopoly of explanations of the physical world were being contradicted and threatened. The Church viewed any scientific theory or even observation that appeared to contradict its interpretations of Scripture as heresy. As a result, in the early 17th Century the Church launched a new Inquisition to take on science itself.

Earlier Inquisitions had already banned the teaching, and even the reading, of Copernican doctrines (that the sun is the center of the solar system and the earth goes the sun). Thus, the discovery of the moons of Jupiter, by the famed Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo, in 1610, and his writing about those observations, which had obvious heliocentric implications, was viewed as heresy. Thus, in 1616, and again in 1633, the Inquisition accused Galileo of heresy. In both cases, after a trial, Galileo’s discoveries, and their evidence-based support for the sun-centered view of the solar system, were found to be false and contrary to Holy Scripture.

After the 1616 trial, Galileo was ordered “not to teach, discuss, or defend the claim that the sun stands still and the earth moves around it, and henceforth not to hold, teach, or defend such views in any way, orally or in writing.”

Galileo did not fully obey this injunction and as a result he was again tried by the Inquisition in 1633, found guilty of heresy, and sentenced to house arrest for life.

What happened to Galileo is significant because it illustrates but one example of the worldwide effort by the Honor Culture of the Catholic Church, and its many powerful allies among the royalty of Europe, to impose by force a single narrow orthodoxy regarding religion, science, philosophy, and political expression.

They almost succeeded. Had the Spanish Armada achieved its goals, science would have been suppressed, and the scientific revolution, which was just beginning, would have been crushed. The many scientific discoveries which led to the modern world would have remained unknown, perhaps for centuries.

This is just one way that the success of the Honor Culture would have profoundly altered the course of Western civilization.

It is important to note that both Catholics and Protestants were Honor Cultures and had either succeeded in defeating or dominating the other, the concept of tolerance would likely have never been accepted by either side. Tolerance arose, and was adopted by the West, because neither side could win. IV. How the adoption of political tolerance sets “the west” apart from the rest of the world.

The adoption of tolerance defines the essential cultural and political difference between the West and the rest of the world, especially with the West’s main rivals, such as Russia and China.

There have always been many striking examples of how differently from the West that Honor Cultures handle dissent. In the Honor Culture of Russia, dissidents were originally sent to Siberia, and more recently jailed, “disappeared”, and even put in mental institutions. For generations, Chinese dissidents have also been punished for dissent. Recently, we have witnessed China suppressing free speech and assembly rights in Hong Kong. Booksellers in Hong Kong who sell books critical of the ruling Communist Party have been “disappeared”, Chinese doctors in Wuhan who tried to warn of the threat of Covid-19 were fired, jailed, or “disappeared”.

While Russia and China are the West’s biggest rivals, they are far from alone in their Honor Culture practices. Most of the rest of the world remain Honor Cultures. To note but one glaring example (among many) of a contemporary Honor Culture, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian national and journalist for the Washington Post, was only a mild dissident, often articulately defending the Saudi Arabian government. Nevertheless, for his occasional disagreements with the Saudi government, he was brutally murdered in 2019 by agents of the Saudi government when he went to the Saudi Embassy in Istanbul, Turkey, to get papers so he could marry.

The similar stories from around the world are routinely reported in the media. These reports showcase the vast differences in how countries in the tolerant West versus Honor Cultures treat their respective citizens who disagree with their country’s practices or current government.

If the Spanish Armada had succeeded in its goals, today there would likely be no tolerance, no Protestant churches, no Reformation, no science, no opposing political parties, no concept of the notion of free speech or religious freedom. And, there would likely be few, if any, democracies in the world. We owe all of this, the bedrock of what we call “the West”, to a single hinge point in history, the failure of the Spanish Armada.

Twice in the 13th Century, huge Chinese invasions of Japan failed due to sudden storms. The Japanese call these storms “the Kamikaze”, which means “Divine Wind” in Japanese. Historians, invoking the Kamikaze, have called the storms which savaged the Armada “the Protestant Wind”. That wind made all the difference.