The Spanish Armada

Religion was the most hotly contested arena among Europe's nation-states and within them by the middle of the 16th century. In England, events in that context turned on the behavior of Mary Queen of Scots, whose kinship, religious, and political ties stretched from France to Scotland to Spain to England and in whose name a series of aggressive claims to the throne of England and conspiracies against Elizabeth were mounted between 1560, when Mary, a Catholic, assumed the throne in Scotland, and 1587, the year of the so-called Babington Plot, a conspiracy of Catholics to depose and/or assassinate the Protestant Elizabeth. As it happened Mary was already in England under house arrest; the Babington episode resulted in Mary's conviction for treason. She was beheaded in 1587.

According to Churchill, Mary's death motivated Catholic Spain to move against Protestant England (150). Only with Mary's death was a 30-year "national problem" of the succession resolved. As Neill puts it:

There was the ordinary question of a changed par

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nion would have been on Spain's side. Neill cites the voluminous pamphleteering that occurred in the wake of Mary's death throughout Europe, which "portrayed Mary as a martyr to her faith who was innocent of the crimes for which she had been executed" (207). To be sure, there were apologists for England's position as well, not least Spenser's Faerie Queene, which Neill positions within the discourse of controversy over Mary's execution. The intensity of conviction regarding Mary's death suggests that if Spain had defeated England, England would have been subject to the severities of the Spanish Inquisition. Certainly in the Netherlands Philip "strengthened the Inquisition and employed it ruthlessly" (Hayes, Baldwin, and Cole 566), a practice that had the effect of intensifying rather than suppressing revolution against Spain in the Netherlands. Yet the mind-set of absolute monarchy was not to be gainsaid. Moreover, in the English case, the long-standing insult to Rome by Henry VIII had been egregious, and the accretion of Protestant prestige because of England's vigorous culture would have had to be overwhelmed for Spain to cement its hold over England. The initial punishment would undoubtedly have been the execu
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1371
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)

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