Isle of Wight Invasion
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In the summer of 1545, an invasion armada of more than two hundred ships, carrying as many as sixty thousand men, appeared in the English Channel and descended upon the Isle of Wight. "In power of offense it was scarcely, if at all, inferior to the Invincible Armada" that appeared in the Channel forty-three years later. The fleet landed a force on the Isle of Wight, the last time in history that a true invasion force would ever set foot on English soil. Once ashore, the modern and powerful French army won some successes against the English militia defenders. In one rout, an English captain fleeing on foot French advance on foot was heard to cry out "a hundred pounds for a horse!" just before he was overtaken--eerily foreshadowing a line that William Shakespeare would later put in the mouth of Richard III.The invasion of the Isle of Wight, though momentous in its way as the last episode of its kind, was short-lived, and it failed for a reason that more profoundly foreshadowed things to come. The Isle of Wight lies just opposite the English naval base of Portsmouth, and in Portsmouth Harbor waited the English Royal Navy. Then as now, no amphibious operation could safely be carried forward in the face of a hostile "fleet in being," so the French troops were withdrawn from the island, and the French fleet advanced into the Solent, the body of water between the island and the English mainland. On the morning of July 20, 1545, as King Henry VIII looked on fro
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the Henrician navy, but rather to gather existing knowledge and understandings, now available only in disparate sources, into a single unified narrative. Only two new hypothesis is set forth in this discussion, and both are necessarily speculative ones.
The Elizabethan navy differed in three important respects from its Henrician predecessor. One of these was strategic, the second tactical, and the third a matter of shipboard organization. The Elizabethan innovation in strategy was the effort to disrupt Spanish seaborne commerce, and specifically to intercept the flow of silver to Spain from the New World. This strategic doctrine was a natural outflow of the circumstances of conflict with Spain; all Europe knew how crucially Spain depended on the treasure galleons to finance its wars, which even with the flow of silver led to repeated royal bankruptcies. If Henry never followed a comparable strategy in wars with France, it was for the very good reason that France had no comparably vital maritime lifeline. This Elizabethan strategy was in any case a failure; though English raids were embarrassing to Spain and profitable to the Queen, the flow of silver was never cut off. A year-round blockade of the Spanish coast, though
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 3545
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)
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