panish Armada of 1588, or else were forestalled by the would-be invaders' inability to sweep the Royal Navy (and, in 1940, the Royal Air Force) from the prospective invasion route. By the nineteenth-century heyday of the British Empire, the British Army was an insignificant fighting force; asked how he would respond to a British landing in Germany, Bismarck is said to have retorted that he would send the police to arrest them. The Royal Navy was at this same time the largest in the world, equal to any two possible rivals, and when in a jingoistic mood, the British sang of ruling the waves.
In short, the campaign of 1545 was the first instance of a pattern that was to become characteristic, the reliance upon the navy as England's first and decisive line of defense. It is, moreover, no accident that it happened when it did, in the reign of Henry VIII. Several English kings, going all the way back to Alfred the Great, have been characterized as "the father of the Royal Navy," but Henry VIII is the most deserving of that title.
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