Great Enterprise the History of the Span - Hardcover - Spanish Armada - Usherwood - 1978

 

Item Condition: Used; Very Good

 

…Introduction
The great enterprise chat Philip II set in motion in 1s86 led, wo
pears later, to the frst major banle in a long seruggle. There had ber
bosalicis on both sides of the Atlantic befoe this, but the Armada
Sebt marked the beginning of a new kind of conflict, che finst wold
wat, in fact, since Philip ruled an empire on which che sun never
set, and boch sides employed a new weapon, the oceanvgoing
galleon, armed with guns fring broadside.
This war had been preceded by a war of words, foaghr with
another new weapon, the printing press. Protestant teaching, speead
ing from Germany and Swizerland, had led to terrible upbeavals in
France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia and che Beicish Isles. Every
wbere Procestants claimed to be restoring Christianisy to a supposed
pre-medieval purity, but the result was more like a revolution than a
reformation. The Catholic church had suffered the dissolution of
religious orders, the pulling down of innumerable buildings, the
dispersal of priceless paintings and manuscripes and the mutilation of
countless works of art, but, most serious of all, wben this wave of
destruction had passed, Catholis in many parts of northern Europe
became subject to penal laws forbidding them to practise their
religion.
Some years before Protestantism had taken dep oot in England,
Elizabeth 's fther, Henry VIll, had set aside his Spanish wife,
Catherine of Aragon, and the reasons he gave for doing so made
their daughter Mary appear illegitimate. Elizabeth was equally
regarded as illegitimate by all those who beld Mary to have been
born in true wedlock Thus what might otherwise have been a
century of friendship between England and Spain ended in bier
strife. Even when Elizabeth, at the age of twenty-five, succeeded to
the thronc, it would sill have been possible for Catholics and
Protestants to live side by side in England and Ireland, but she
decided otherwise. A Protestant Church was established and its
forms of public worship became the only ones legally permitted. …….