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The Spanish Armada

Had the Spanish Armada won the battle with England in 1588, Europe would have developed differently in cultural terms, but ultimately, for reasons having to do with Spain's internal culture, the political configuration of Europe might have evolved in ways more or less similar to the way it in fact did develop. Why that is so can be seen in the complex geopolitical, cultural, and religious dynamics of late-16th-century Europe.

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 party at court with the ensuing reversals among the fortunes of the nobility, but there was fear also of an unwelcome foreign alliance if Mary Stuart should come to the throne with French or Spanish assistance. . . . Deeply embedded in the English mind was the fear of civil discord, and throughout Elizabeth's reign it was nearly always associated with the thought of the unsettled succession (Neill 193; 195).

It would be wrong to ignore the religious concern...

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The Spanish Armada. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 18:59, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/2000126.html