Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. This week in 1588, the English Navy defeated

the Spanish Armada. After a series of running battles culminated in a major clash of the

town of Graveling which now sits just inside the French border with Belgium. Country to

what you might be told, it was a crushing naval victory. The weather, if anything, actually

benefited the Spanish during the course of this week in 1588. Subscaled is the battered,

ill, starving survivors in their battle-damaged ships, headed around Scotland and Ireland,

then of course the weather turned against them. Terrible gales drove surviving ships onto

the rocky west coast of Scotland and Trim, Donegal. And it was a shadow of the mighty force

which left Iberia in the summer of 1588 that staggered back into Centandere in September

of that year. It's one of the great epics of naval history. It was probably the largest

heaviest feat ever sent into the Western Atlantic at that time. It was defeated by a combination

of great English and sea ferrismen like Hawkins, Drake, Frobyshire and their Commander

Howard, new ship designs and new ideas about how to fight war at sea. It's a really important

story in the development of modern naval warfare. It's also an important story in the development

of the myth of English and British exceptionalism. It's become a founding myth of the English

and British empires. For the first time people dared to think, perhaps God was on their side.

God was an Englishman and it would inspire and provoke English sea ferris, statesmen,

writers and generations to come. As a result we've already had the pod out this week

in which we talked about the background of Anglo-Spanish competition. But today is the story

of the Spanish Armada, featuring me. You know when I started out as a podcaster, I was

promised I wouldn't be that guy. That strange middle-aged guy is monologueed, shouting into

his own microphone for hours on end about history. Today I'm that strange middle-aged guy,

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