History & Film | The Spanish Armada in Film, Fiction, and Fact

WRITTEN BY JENNY BARDEN

‘Throw away the history books and behold the majesty.’ This was BBC Movies’ review of Shekhar Kapur’s epic: Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007).¹ The film was, by Kapur’s own admission: ‘…based on mythology. It is the story of a queen who became a myth.’² The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 has remained memorable for over four centuries partly for this reason: it helped create the legend of Elizabeth I as an icon. ‘Not an earthly queen at all’, to use the words of one of Elizabeth’s ladies at Tilbury in Elizabeth I: A Novel (2011) by Margaret George. In this perceptive fictionalised biography, when Elizabeth appears in silver armour over her white dress before making her famous speech to the troops, she muses: ‘The look on their faces showed me that I had utterly transformed myself from the woman, albeit Queen, they served every day into something higher…’ Kapur went a step further and saw her as on the path to divinity, The Golden Age coming after the critically-acclaimed Elizabeth (1998), in a projected series which would end with a third film in which: ‘Elizabeth truly becomes divine.’³

To reinforce the interpretation of Elizabeth as icon, she is often depicted as central to the success of the fleet in battle, much as she appears in the famous ‘Armada Portrait’ commissioned to celebrate the victory immediately afterwards. In fact, she took no part in either campaign or command, though she did deliver a morale boosting address to her land forces at Tilbury. The problem with the Tilbury speech as a dramatic pivot around which to hang the triumph of England’s admirals is that it occurred eleven days after the crucial sea battle of Gravelines, at a time when the fleet had only just begun returning from pursuing the Armada as far as Scotland, and news of the victory was still trickling in. No-one really knew whether the victory had been decisive; the Armada had not been sunk, and the Duke of Parma remained with his invasion force massed near Dunkirk. So, novelists and film directors have frequently succumbed to the temptation to shift the timing, and place the speech before the battle, or even have Elizabeth dictating the action.

In the movie Fire Over England (1937) (loosely based on the novel by A.E.W. Mason), the heroic Michael Ingolby (Laurence Olivier) returns from Spain to find the Queen at Tilbury where he reveals the names of Catholic conspirators. She knights him on the spot, the would-be traitors are shamed into declaring their allegiance to her and accompanying Michael on a mission, masterminded by the Queen, to confront the Armada, then massing off the coast of England, and attack it with fireships. Of course, an attack with fireships really did occur and succeeded in breaking the Armada’s formation, but this happened the night before the battle of Gravelines, and off Calais, not the cliffs of Dover. It looks as if Kapur took his history from Fire Over England rather than the textbooks, because there’s a very similar but even more embellished scene in The Golden Age. Elizabeth (Cate Blanchett) appears in full armour astride a white charger to give her rousing speech to thousands of awe-struck soldiers who fall to their knees. Shortly afterwards, Sir Walter Raleigh (Clive Owen) leads fireships to set the Armada galleons ablaze, which come to grief at the foot of the cliffs of Dover, in the midst of a thunderstorm, while Elizabeth looks on from the heights in her shift, transfigured in white light. The New York Times called the film: ‘A kitsch extravaganza aquiver with trembling bosoms, booming guns and wild energy…’⁴ Bethany Latham neatly summed up the film’s impact in her book Elizabeth I in Film and Television (2011)⁵: ‘This focus on spectacle worked for productions from Hollywood’s golden age, but it does not fit well with the pretension and rampant symbolism of Kapur’s idiom.’⁶

Somehow, the history became almost altogether forgotten in The Golden Age. Raleigh was nowhere near the action in the defeat of the Spanish Armada, and the rest of the screenplay follows Kapur’s preoccupation with myth over reality. Interestingly, Graham Greene writing for The Spectator in 1937 acknowledged that Fire Over England was ‘well-directed and lavish’, but criticised its lack of historical realism. The production has ‘strayed out of history’ he said, and certain scenes were ‘absurd and embarrassing’.⁷ But while Fire Over England was a phenomenal success at the box office, The Golden Age was not (despite its stirring music, superb sets, fantastic CGI and a strong performance from Blanchett). Why? Probably because the former was released as part of a drive to engender patriotic fervour when fascism was on the rise in Germany, and there was not the same appetite for history mash-ups and British triumphalist myth-making in 2007.

This leads on to another aspect of the legend that has grown up around the Spanish Armada’s failure to invade England in 1588, and the mauling it received at the hands of the ragtag fleet commanded by Howard and Drake: that of the birth of Britannia’s rule over the waves. ‘For the Victorians, the Armada victory marked the start of the British Empire,’ said Lucy Worsley in her excellent myth-busting docudrama: The Spanish Armada (2020).⁸ In the nineteenth century, stirring stories involving Drake’s adventures were all the rage, such as Westward Ho! (1855) by Charles Kingsley. For Elizabeth, back in the sixteenth century, an empire was purely aspirational (based largely on Sir Walter Raleigh’s claim to Virginia in her name), but the defeat of the Armada did demonstrate that England had faster and more manoeuvrable ships than Spain and Portugal (then the global superpower, united under Philip II). It also showed that English guns and tactics were better, and it led to an appreciation that the navy was crucial to Britain’s survival and ambitions on the world stage.

From the success of the English fleet in battle (albeit defensive and without many of the Armada’s ships taken or destroyed in combat), there developed yet another legend: that of the triumph of freedom over tyranny. This was the message that underscored Fire Over England, and which was amplified in The Sea Hawk (1940)⁹ produced after the start of WWII. In the later film, Geoffrey Thorpe (Errol Flynn) is an English privateer on a secret mission to seize the Spanish treasure fleet who is later captured, tried by the Inquisition, sentenced to labour on the galleys, escapes, rescues his true love (serving as a maid-of-honour to the Queen), unmasks a Spanish collaborator amongst the royal advisors, and reveals the Spanish plan to invade England in time for Elizabeth to order the building of a great defensive fleet. In a superb performance as Elizabeth, Flora Robson declares: ‘When the ambition of one man threatens to engulf the earth, it becomes the duty of all free men, wherever they may be, to affirm that the earth belongs not to any one man, but to all men…’

This idea of the fight against the Spanish Armada being a fight for freedom has been taken up many times. Indeed, the words: ‘Let tyrants fear’ appear in the most famous version of the speech which Elizabeth is reputed to have made at Tilbury. It is this version, the ‘heart and stomach of a king’ speech, that Elizabeth delivers inspirationally in Alison Weir’s novel The Marriage Game (2014).¹º The speech was made much of in The Golden Age, a film in which the fight against tyranny is a recurring theme, for example when Elizabeth says: ‘God forbid it [the Armada] succeeds, for there will be no more liberty in England of conscience or of thought.’ Kapur saw Philip II as: ‘a man committed to a sense of purity… a certain singularity… [which] can give rise to fundamentalism… Whereas Elizabeth… her idea of faith was that it can encompass all faiths… that’s what we need now…’¹¹ The ‘now’ when Kapur said this was 2009, in the post-9/11 years that saw a growing appreciation of the dangers of extreme fundamentalism.

As terrorist threats on the scale of 9/11 have receded from the headlines, and fear of invasion for most of the free world is no longer an immediate concern, what is the relevance now of stories relating to the defeat of the Spanish Armada? Is anyone still interested? Thankfully, yes. Such stories seem to have come of age, not concerned with recycling myths about Elizabeth as Gloriana, or Anglophone countries as bastions of freedom, but with presenting a balanced view of what actually happened through different perspectives — with telling truth through fiction.

The distinguished naval historian J.D. Davies has recently written a cracking good novel, satisfyingly based on the historical facts: Armada’s Wake (2021). I asked him whether there were any underlying themes he wished to explore, such as religious intolerance v freedom of faith; tyranny v self-determination; and the birth of British national identity. ‘All the above!’ was his answer. ‘But one thing I was determined to do from the outset was avoid the nationalistic triumphalism that characterizes many accounts of the Armada… hence having one of the central characters in Armada’s Wake as a galley slave in the Armada, allowing readers to view the campaign from the Spanish perspective.’ Davies shows a multitude of viewpoints in the novel; the events are seen through the eyes of different members of a family divided by faith, circumstance and prejudice. There’s even a Catholic widow formerly married to a Spaniard brought to trial accused of witchcraft. Another novel which offers a balanced perspective is John Stack’s action-packed Armada (2012) which follows the path of a secret Catholic who is a trusted officer in Drake’s fleet, as well as one of the Spanish commanders whose determination, at the end of the story, is to ‘take the fight back to the English, for God, his King, and Spain.’ In fact, the fight did continue — two more armadas were sent by Spain only to be scattered by storms, and there was an unsuccessful Counter Armada launched by the English; all have become buried in history.¹²

There’s one other docudrama worthy of note and that’s Dan Snow’s well-researched Armada: 12 Days to Save England (2015).¹³ The events and battles are followed day-by-day with the help of an army of eminent historians, though there’s a bit of sleight-of-hand to reinforce the drama of everything hanging on a knife-edge. (I’m sure that Drake didn’t need to capture the Rosario in order to ‘discover’ that Spanish gun-carriages were designed for land warfare — he’d been attacking and seizing Spanish galleons and ordnance for years!).

Will the story of the Spanish Armada continue to be retold? I hope so; it’s thrilling and endlessly fascinating. As Lucy Worsley says: ‘It has a powerful legacy… [It] gives us the confidence to believe in ourselves.’

About the contributor: Jenny Barden is a historical novelist who has at various times been a farmer, artist and city solicitor. She is published by Ebury Press, and has just finished a psychological thriller set at the time of the Spanish Armada.

Notes:

¹ BBC Movies review, 2 November 2007
² Wild Films India interview with Shekhar Kapur, YouTube, uploaded 31 August 2024 (Translated from Hindi. Kapur went on to say ‘…like Ram and Sita’s story’)
³ Empire Magazine interview with Shekhar Kapur, YouTube, 14 September 2009
⁴ New York Times review, 12 October 2007
⁵ Bethany Latham, Elizabeth I in Film and Television – A Study of the Major Portrayals
⁶ Further evidence of Kapur’s fascination with Fire Over England is the curious fact that both films feature an assassination attempt upon Elizabeth with an unloaded pistol. This never actually happened. (For history nerds, John Somerville, a Catholic, did plan to kill Elizabeth with a pistol in 1583 but was arrested before he could attempt anything.)
⁷ The Spectator review, 5 March 1937
⁸ Royal History’s Biggest Fibs with Lucy Worsley, BBC TV Series 1:2, The Spanish Armada
⁹ The Sea Hawk took its name from an earlier popular novel by Rafael Sabatini to which it bore no resemblance.
¹º In Armada’s Wake by J. D. Davies there’s a very witty take on the speech in which the more famous version is delivered extempore by an actor, very few people being able to hear what the Queen actually said, and this version is written down by the Chaplain to Lord Essex who’d been called away from hearing the Queen’s oration by an urgent visit to the jakes!
¹¹ Empire Magazine – ibid
¹² A point made in Worsley’s docudrama, though she did allow Luis Gorrochategui Santos to bang on at length about the Counter Armada, someone who seems to be on a single-handed mission to promulgate a legend about that with as much zeal as the Elizabethans devoted to celebrating Flavit et Dissipati Sunt in 1588!
¹³ This excellent BBC mini-series is marred only by the appearance of Anita Dobson as Elizabeth wearing make-up applied with the expertise of a five-year-old and looking (at fifty-four) much older than her lady-in-waiting Blanche Parry (who would then have been at least eighty and going blind!)

Published in Historical Novels Review | Issue 114 (November 2025)