Royal history is at the heart of our national identity.
We think of it as the definitive truth about our past.
Dates and facts, kings and queens, all consigned to a past
that's unchanging and fixed.
But it's not like that at all.
History is a chorus of voices,
each of them shouting out its own version of the story.
And very often, it's the loudest voices that get heard most clearly.
In this series, I'm lifting the lid on three of royal history's
great nation-building stories.
Henry the Vlll's Reformation.
This was a political earthquake that broke England's
ties with Europe.
So why is it often told as a sexy royal soap opera?
Queen Anne helped create Great Britain,
but she's remembered as a disastrous monarch.
Did her liberal enemies blacken her reputation?
And in this episode, Elizabeth I and the Spanish Armada,
when the English Navy destroyed an invincible Spanish fleet.
The defeat of the Spanish Armada
is often talked about as the crowning achievement
of Elizabeth l's golden age
and a defining moment in English history.
England's great naval victory made icons of Sir Francis Drake
and the Virgin Queen...
"And a king of England too!"
...and it laid the foundations of the British Empire.
It's a great story, but it's full of exaggerations, distortions
and some whopping great fibs.
Was England really the plucky underdog?
This is fake news, isn't it?
You'd think people would see through it
but actually people believe what they want to believe.
Did Elizabeth truly play a crucial role in England's triumph?
It is the victors who write history, of course.
This is a classic case of that.
And was the Armada the decisive victory we've always believed?
The Counter Armada was a terrible defeat
for England, and they hid the history.
The Spanish Armada marked out England
as an exceptional island nation,
destined by God for special things.
This is the moment we took on Europe
and won...
...or so the story goes.
The Spanish Armada of 1588
is told as the founding story
of the British Empire.
This little Protestant island
is attacked by Catholic Spain,
the mightiest imperial power in the world.
And victory sets Elizabeth l's England
on the road to imperial glory.
Traditionally, the story begins
with the Elizabethan sea dog, Sir Francis Drake,
playing a game of bowls in Plymouth
when the Armada is first spotted off the English coast.
Francis Drake is the embodiment of Cool Britannia. Ha-ha!
Of "Keep Calm And Carry On."
He turned to Lord Howard, commander of the English fleet,
and he said, "We've plenty of time to finish our game
"and to thrash the Spaniards too!"
It's classic English understatement.
It's nonchalance under fire.
Unfortunately, though, it's likely to be a complete fabrication.
Not one of the first accounts of the Armada mention
anyone playing bowls.
So where does it come from?
25 years after the event, we finally get a historical document
which mentions the sailors at Plymouth dancing, bowling
and making merry on the shore.
Nearly 150 years after that, local legends about Drake
finishing his game entered the history books,
and by 1888, at the height of empire,
his line about thrashing the Spanish was in print too.
Drake had become the perfect imperial hero to inspire
future generations with his stiff upper lip.
WINSTON CHURCHILL: We must regard the next week or so
as a very important week for us
in our history.
It ranks with the days when the Spanish Armada
was approaching the Channel,
and Drake was finishing his game of bowls.
The story of the Spanish Armada was manipulated
right from the start.
This story is often presented as a personal battle
between two bitter enemies,
Philip ll of Spain and Queen Elizabeth I.
In 1588, Philip was 61, a devout Catholic
and king of a global empire.
Elizabeth was 54, the unmarried, childless,
Protestant Queen of England.
The story goes that Philip
couldn't bear to see Elizabeth on the throne.
But actually, three decades before the Armada,
he'd helped get her there in the first place.
In 1554, 34 years before the Spanish Armada,
Philip became part of the Tudor family.
He set sail for England to marry
Elizabeth's Catholic half-sister, Queen Mary I.
We often forget that before he was King of Spain,
Philip ll, the great villain of the story of the Armada,
had spent four years as King of England.
His wife, Queen Mary, was the Catholic daughter
of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon.
When she became queen in 1553, Mary reversed the Protestant Reformation
and restored England to the Roman Catholic faith.
Mary and Philip both wanted to secure England's religious future
with a Catholic heir.
But if they failed to produce a child,
the crown would be up for grabs after Mary's death.
Next in line to the throne was Elizabeth,
the Protestant daughter of Henry Vlll's second wife, Anne Boleyn.
The chief rival was her Catholic cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots.
And Mary Tudor hated the idea of her half-sister
ever becoming queen.
One of the ambassadors to court recorded that Mary's opinion
of Elizabeth was that she was illegitimate,
the daughter of a strumpet!
Mary wasn't a fan.
She doubted her half-sister's loyalty,
to herself as queen, and also to the Catholic faith.
Mary thought that Elizabeth was involved in all sorts
of plots against her.
She even had her locked up for a while
in the Tower of London.
But Mary's Spanish husband, Philip, he had a different opinion.
The truth is, Philip was on Elizabeth's side.
He even persuaded Mary to free her from house arrest
because the Catholic alternative, Mary, Queen of Scots,
would have brought England under the control
of Philip's enemies, the French.
There was no way, for political reasons, that Philip could allow
Mary, Queen of Scots, to become Queen of England
because Mary was betrothed to the son of the King of France,
and England would have been absorbed into the French Empire,
had Mary, Queen of Scots, become Queen of England.
So there's lots of things wrong with Elizabeth.
She's got this dangerous Protestant tendency.
She's illegitimate in the eyes of his wife, but she's
the least-bad alternative as far as Philip's concerned.
Yes. And also, he was convinced that he could turn her...
Into a good Catholic? ..Into a good Catholic.
Elizabeth, you know, she appeared to be submissive.
She attended Catholic Church services, including the Mass.
Had she the right husband,
she would conform, or at least keep the Church where it was.
And how did Mary feel about this pressure her husband was putting
on to her, to be nice to her sister, to make her the successor?
From the evidence that we have,
it does seem that she was just not
prepared to be the good wife.
She dug her heels in, as well.
She did not want Elizabeth to be her successor.
But she had to, in the end, give way.
And so, at the end of her life, she tried to fix Elizabeth
into committing herself into being a Catholic,
but was unsuccessful.
Poor Mary. Just doesn't get what she wants.
In November 1558, Mary Tudor was on her deathbed.
Philip knew that when Mary died,
his influence over England would die too.
So he sent his ambassador to remind Elizabeth
just how much he'd supported her.
The meeting didn't go well.
She did concede that, yes,
maybe he had helped her to get out of jail,
but she did not concede any role he might claim
in her likely succession to the throne.
If she got to the throne,
she said, it would be her people who had put her there.
Elizabeth was already writing the Spanish king out of her story.
When Mary died, Philip made a last attempt
to save Catholic England.
He proposed to Elizabeth,
on condition that she converted to the Roman Catholic faith.
Months later, she turned him down.
By then, Philip was making an alliance with France
by marrying a French princess.
Elizabeth jokes,
and this is classic Elizabeth I,
that he couldn't have loved her all that much
if he couldn't even wait a few months for her answer.
But they didn't fall out over this.
Their letters remained in the friend zone.
He referred to her as his sister whom he loved.
They resolved that they were going to remain allies.
When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558,
she returned England to the Protestant faith,
but the country was divided.
To many in her court, Elizabeth wasn't Protestant enough.
She kept some of the practices associated
with her father's Anglo-Catholicism.
For others, Elizabeth was too Protestant.
The Pope encouraged Catholics to rebel,
and also put pressure on Philip
to help get rid of the queen.
But Philip still didn't want to go to war with Elizabeth.
Legend has it that, when it came to the Armada,
Catholic Spain started it.
They were the aggressors invading England
just because it was Protestant.
But that's way too simplistic.
It was going to take more than religion
to drive Philip into war.
Philip had a global empire
and the Pope had given him a monopoly
on trade routes to the Americas.
But in the third decade of Elizabeth's reign, she began
protecting Protestant interests by challenging
Philip's global domination.
Elizabeth encouraged English sailors like Francis Drake
to plunder Spanish ships and ports in the New World.
Her coffers were soon filling up with Spanish gold.
In 1580, Drake returned
from a lucrative circumnavigation of the globe.
Elizabeth rewarded him with a knighthood.
The knighting of Drake marked him out as a national treasure.
But not everybody was pleased.
To the Spanish, Drake was nothing more than a pirate,
a thief who'd stolen their gold.
Elizabeth couldn't afford an all-out war with Philip,
but she was determined to curb Spanish power
before it crushed Protestant Europe.
UPBEAT FLAMENCO FAN FARE
England wasn't just damaging Spain's interests in the New World,
it was also goading Spain on its own doorstep in Europe.
In Philip's territory in the Netherlands,
the Protestant population was rebelling.
Elizabeth sent an army of over 6,000 troops
to help the Protestant revolt.
Elizabeth knew that this was a dangerous move,
so she set about taking control of the story.
The queen circulated a pamphlet across Europe
justifying her actions.
She claimed she wasn't attacking her brother and ally, Philip,
she was just defending her neighbours.
Despite Elizabeth's attempts to spin the story,
to Philip, she was clearly supporting rebellion against him.
To make matters worse,
English ships were now raiding ports
on the Spanish coast.
Elizabeth had provoked Spain into action,
and Philip's plans for the Armada began to take shape.
Philip would now unleash Spain's imperial power.
To stop Elizabeth's games,
he would have to invade England and depose her.
After two years of planning,
the Spanish Armada finally set sail in May 1588.
In the usual story of the Spanish Armada,
it's gone down as invincible,
the largest fleet ever to sail on England.
Basically, the Armada is Goliath.
SHE YELLS
Meanwhile, England is the plucky little underdog,
fighting a cruel giant
determined to make the streets of London run with blood.
But that image is something of an exaggeration.
This wasn't the biggest fleet ever to attack England.
Bigger invasion fleets had been sent by the Normans in 1066,
and by the French in 1545.
The Spanish fleet had around 130 ships.
The queen's navy was only 34 ships strong.
But a host of private ships were commandeered to create a force
which outnumbered the Spanish.
And before they even left home the Spanish Navy was in trouble.
Some of the ships were damaged.
Some of the men had diseases.
Some of the provisions had gone rotten.
So they had to stop at Corunna in northern Spain,
and from here, their commander, the Duke of Medina Sidonia,
wrote to King Philip.
And he said, "Look, it's not going at all well.
"My sailors are utterly useless."
But the king wrote back and he said,
"Pull yourself together, man, and get on with it!"
The Armada's aim was to sail in tight formation up the Channel,
towards its narrowest point.
There they would meet an army of 26,000 soldiers
from the Netherlands.
The Armada would protect this army as it crossed to invade England.
As the Spanish made their way along the Channel,
they were hounded by the English Navy.
But the first two major casualties to the Armada
were self-inflicted.
A crash within the Spanish fleet allowed Francis Drake
to capture one of the damaged ships, the Rosario.
But this disease-ridden,
accident-prone Armada would soon be spun
into the Goliath of history.
Because the fighting was all happening out at sea,
communication was a real problem,
and this led to rumour and speculation,
and sometimes even outright lies.
The capture of the Rosario gave the popular press
the most wonderful story to exploit.
ENERGETIC SINGING OF VICTORY BALLAD
The English were fearful of invasion,
and news of the campaign
was spread through the streets by popular ballads.
MUSIC: AjOYFUL NEW BALLAD by Thomas Deloney
Political songs were big sellers in this period.
These Armada ballads are sort of political news
and political commentary, as well.
In this case, the words are by a man called Thomas Deloney,
who was probably the greatest songwriter of his age.
He's like, you know, Elton john, Lennon and McCartney,
he knew how to kind of lay down a hit like nobody else.
Within a few clays of the capture of the Rosario,
Thomas Deloney had written a ballad about it.
It seems like it's about current affairs,
but if you actually look at the words,
this is fake news, isn't it?
It's not just news. It's fake news.
Yes, definitely, but it is based on these actual events that happened,
which are then sort of blown up, blown out of proportion.
The emphasis is very much on the might of the Spanish.
The idea that, you know, that, actually, there's this huge force
with massive ships, you know, massively armed,
and plucky little England somehow survived.
And what you don't get is the fact that the Rosario
basically took itself, in a way. It bumped into another Spanish ship,
so it was a Spanish own goal.
But in the ballad,
it's more about, you know, a mighty kind of mismatch
between a huge Catholic empire
and a tiny, little Protestant nation.
There's something about the language of it.
We've got virgins being deflowered and babies being smited.
That's very sort of tabloid, isn't it?
Definitely. I mean, it is whipping up a frenzy
against, you know, a dangerous foreign force.
You know, you'd think people would see through it,
but I think there's always that sense that people believe
what they want to believe.
It's amazing that there's nothing official about this.
This isn't the government. It's the marketplace.
And yet, it is propaganda for the Tudor regime.
It is. Yeah. It does seem to be commercially driven.
It does seem to be giving the English public what they want.
It's a time of national panic.
So to be told constantly,
God is on your side,
that you've had this miraculous escape
which just proves that whatever happens to you, you'll be OK,
is kind of reassuring, at that point in time.
I think he created a story that resonated in 1588,
and it has resonated whenever England is in danger from Europe.
And doesn't it still resonate today? It does!
It does still resonate today. Yes. Yes, indeed.
The Spanish Armada was followed up the Channel for eight days.
But as they reached Calais
there was still no sign of the invasion troops.
Now they had to wait, exposed to attack.
It's at this point in the story that Elizabeth's big moment comes,
and normally she's dressed to impress for it,
perhaps in a white velvet gown,
maybe with feathers in her hair, or even wearing armour.
The queen visits her army, here at Tilbury, on the banks
of the Thames, where they're assembled
to protect Essex from invasion.
She delivers a rousing speech to the troops.
She says that she, herself,
is here in the midst and heat
of battle to live and die amongst you all.
"L know I have the body but of a weak and feeble woman,
"but I have the heart and stomach of a king,
"and of a king of England, too.
"L, myself, will take up arms.
"L, myself, will be your general,
"judge and rewarder of every one of your virtues in the field."
In the traditional version of the story,
the queen's speech launches the attack.
The English set fire to eight of their own ships
and sent them off into the midst of the Armada.
In a panic, Spanish ships cut anchor and were scattered.
Three collided and one ran aground.
In the battle that followed, four Spanish ships were lost.
Then strong winds drove the Armada to the north.
Cutting their losses, the Spanish headed home
via Scotland and Ireland.
It seems like Elizabeth's rallying cry worked, it did the trick.
But, in fact, the story of her most famous speech
is riddled with holes,
and the biggest fib of all lies in the timing.
When Elizabeth began planning her Tilbury visit,
invasion did seem imminent.
But by the time she actually made the speech, the battle was over.
This extravaganza at Tilbury happened
a whole 11 clays after the fire ships
and by this point, the Spanish Armada,
well, it had floated off.
It was somewhere off the coast of Scotland.
Not only were the men not going to get to do any fighting,
very soon, they were going to get sent home,
and that was because the queen couldn't afford
to go on paying their wages.
But that didn't fit with the image of Elizabeth
that was already emerging, even as the Armada sailed home.
A poet called James Aske,
who claimed to have been at Tilbury,
wrote an epic verse called Elizabeth Triumphans,
in November 1588.
It mythologised Elizabeth as a warrior queen, and it placed
Tilbury before the battle for dramatic effect.
But Aske doesn't mention the most famous line in her speech.
The reference to the heart and stomach of a king
doesn't appear until 35 years after the event.
It was first introduced by a Protestant chaplain
who'd also been at Tilbury,
and who was keen to glorify the now-long-dead Elizabeth.
Historians still argue over the speech's authenticity.
But, accurate or not, the queen's speech at Tilbury
is now part of our history, and it continues
to inspire in the 21st century.
During the 2019 Women's World Cup,
an advert featured English celebrities
performing the speech.
As the Armada made its long journey back to Spain, at least 22 ships
were sunk in storms off the coast of Scotland and Ireland.
It wasn't the queen or her navy
who had dealt the decisive blow to the Spanish Armada,
it was the weather,
but that suited the Elizabethan narrative very well.
If anyone still doubted
that the future of England was Protestant,
this victory would be used to put them right.
The storms which had scattered the Armada were God's storms,
which meant that God had clearly picked the Protestant side,
and all over Europe
Protestants were determined to make a big deal about this.
Even Elizabeth herself wrote a verse praising the God who'd made
the winds and waters rise to scatter all of her enemies.
In the Netherlands celebratory medals were struck, like this one.
It says on it, "He blew."
That's God blew.
And they were "Dissipati".
They were dissipated, they were scattered.
England was a unified, victorious Protestant nation.
After the Armada, the Protestant propaganda war continued.
A letter from a Catholic priest in England
to the Spanish ambassador in Paris was published across Europe.
The person who wrote the letter found it highly regrettable
that Spain had tried to invade England, and he claims that even
English Catholics had thought that this was a bad idea,
a mistake in the eyes of the Lord.
He even claims that these English Catholics
are more loyal to their queen than they are to the Pope.
The word he uses is "addicted". He says they are addicted to her.
And some translations finish like this -
"Here ends the story of the misfortunes of the Spanish Armada,
"which they used to call invincible."
"lNVINCIBLE". Ha-ha-ha!
It's even written in capital letters
just to heighten that delicious irony.
The description of the Armada as "invincible" still appears
in history books today,
but it was never used by the Spanish
to describe their Armada, and it gets worse.
The letter was a fake.
It was a forgery.
It was made up by the Machiavellian William Cecil,
Elizabeth's close adviser.
There are even drafts of it in his own handwriting.
But this was a brilliantly successful bit of fake news.
People believed it and they thought, well, if even the English Catholics
are keen on the queen then she must now truly rule
over a unified nation.
In November 1588,
Queen Elizabeth I held a procession through London.
This was her victory parade.
The queen made her way through the city to St Paul's,
to give thanks.
God and his chosen special monarch
together had saved the day.
THEY were the hero and the heroine at the heart of this narrative.
But in reality, though, things weren't quite so heroic.
Elizabeth's promise at Tilbury to reward her soldiers
proved to be empty rhetoric.
The war had drained Elizabeth's coffers.
The sailors who fought for England were hit by disease,
and were still fighting for their wages.
The Crown threatened prison
for those slanderously suggesting that they hadn't been paid.
William Cecil now rubbed salt into the wound.
He said, "Well, if the soldiers die of illness,
"then at least the Crown won't have to pay them!"
By the end of 1588,
more than half of the men who'd fought in the Armada campaign
were dead, and they were killed not by the Spanish,
but by disease and starvation.
The reality of post-Armada England
was economic crisis and an increasingly unpopular queen.
But history was soon to forget all of this, thanks to the courtiers
who commissioned a painting which celebrated the queen
and her Armada victory.
This portrait is absolutely overflowing with symbolism
and, indeed, the pearls are probably
the most prominent symbol in this picture.
It seems to be this sort of endless abundance of them.
Pearls at this period symbolised purity and chastity.
And, of course, Elizabeth at this point, in 1588,
she's in her mid-50s,
she's no longer of child-bearing age,
and we see this cult of the Virgin Queen being introduced.
So we have, for example, this fabulous pearl positioned
exactly where, in a portrait of Henry VIII,
you'd have an enormous codpiece, for example.
This is Elizabeth really playing on this idea
of her virginity, and, of course, this is a mirror
of the idea of the impenetrability of England.
A virgin queen who'd failed to produce an heir
was highly problematic.
But in the story of the Armada,
Elizabeth's virginity becomes a superpower.
This puts her front and centre of the events unfolding,
and it positions her really
as the sort of grand choreographer of what's going on.
And she is, if you like, the source of light in this picture,
and she is casting her light onto this scene,
in the left of the picture of the English fleet,
and turning her back, of course, on the Spanish fleet,
which is wrecked in this storm.
She's taking the credit for it all, really? Absolutely.
Yeah. Good for her. Ha-ha. She owns it.
And what has she got under her hands there?
This hand is hovering over a globe,
and you can just about make out her fingers
are almost caressing, if you like, an image of the Americas.
This is a not-so-subtle reference to her
and to England's ambitions for empire.
But indeed, when she died, there was no empire to be spoken of
beyond the British Isles.
This is really an image of aspiration
and not of reality.
The British Empire starts here...
Indeed. ..in the grasp of those white fingers. Yeah.
This is the, sort of, the creation myth, if you like.
This idea of Britain as an island nation
that is looking globally,
with its ambitions, across the Atlantic.
This is just an amazingly powerful propaganda message, isn't it?
And wouldn't you say it's really worked terrifically well?
It is the victors who write history, of course,
so this is a classic case of that.
And the painters who paint history, as well. Indeed.
They did a very good job in selling her version.
The Armada portrait has become the lasting symbol
of Elizabeth's triumph,
forever connecting the queen with victory and empire.
But the reality was that Spain's empire and navy
continued to dominate the world for another half century.
In 1603,
the Tudor dynasty came to an end with Elizabeth's death.
The crowns of England and Scotland were united
as James VI of Scotland became James I of England.
England remained a Protestant country,
but a Catholic resistance was still at work
and Elizabethan propaganda still came in useful.
In this small church in Norfolk
is a pair of paintings created in the 17th century,
during the reign of King James I.
So, Natalie, what's happening in these amazing pictures?
So, on this side, we have a depiction of the Spanish Armada
and particularly Elizabeth visiting the troops at Tilbury,
with a depiction of the fire ships in the background.
The fire ships are fantastic.
So this painting depicts the Gunpowder Plot of 1605.
It was a Catholic plot to blow up James,
his heir, Prince Henry, and the whole of Parliament.
So this is the opening of Parliament and below that,
and it is unfortunately very dark...
It's quite exciting!
...you can just see the cellars
and here, you can see the conspirators being discovered.
And we actually see right at the far corner, a devil,
just to make sure you know who's on the wrong side.
I didn't know that the Devil himself took part in the plot,
but I guess it all makes sense.
So the two paintings we've got,
defeating the Armada, defeating the Gunpowder Plot,
some parallel is being drawn here.
What was the purpose of putting them up
in this church, do you think?
So, these are two key moments in English Protestant history.
On both occasions, God intervenes in England's favour.
So these paintings are using these kind of iconic moments
of Protestant history to give a message to the parishioners
who would have seen them on a sort of daily basis,
about how to act and how to behave.
A message for parishioners can be found in another version
of the Tilbury speech at the bottom of the painting.
It doesn't have all those famous phrases about,
"l may have the body of a weak and feeble woman,
"but I have the heart and stomach of a king."
Instead, it emphasises that though we may be in danger from Spain
and from Catholicism, we've got God on our side. Yes.
And the real danger will be if we forfeit God's favour
by being sinful and ungodly.
So it's a message actually about being more pious
and using the Armada as a symbol of God's providence
and favour to England and the English church.
But these paintings may also contain a subtle message for the king.
Why in james's reign were people glorifying Elizabeth
and the defeat of the Armada like this?
Well, some people had their suspicions about James,
that he was too sympathetic to Catholics,
both in England and abroad.
He sees his role in Europe as a peacemaker.
He does negotiate a peace with Spain at the beginning of his reign.
And then, most famously, he negotiates a marriage
between his son, Prince Charles, who is heir by that time,
to marry the Spanish lnfanta
and that occurs in 1623-4.
Now, certainly at that time,
the imagery of the Armada
and Elizabeth very much comes to the fore
because Elizabeth is seen
as a champion against Spanish and Catholic aggression,
and so her image is used, particularly by critics
of the Spanish match, as a sort of a warning to James.
No, you shouldn't be effecting this marriage to Spain.
Look what they've done to us in the past.
You should be acting more like Elizabeth and standing up
against Spain and Catholicism.
So, at that point in 17th-century history, when James was flirting
with the Spanish, it made sense for people to start talking
about how great Elizabeth was at beating the Spanish.
Exactly. You can never criticise a king openly.
So, what you could do is you
give an example of someone else,
and that's the model that you should be following.
The heroic queen strand of the Armada tale
continued to dominate in the 17th century,
but an alternative narrative was fighting to get out.
With all this talk about a Protestant wind and a royal victory,
the contribution that the Navy made to the defeat
of the Spanish Armada seemed to be taking second place.
But the commander of the fleet, Lord Howard of Effingham,
he saw things differently.
In 1592, Lord Howard commissioned one of Europe's greatest weavers
to create ten tapestries for his London home.
Based on his own account of the campaign,
they cost over £1,500,
the equivalent of 87 years' wages
for the average English worker at the time.
These tapestries told the naval story of the Armada
on a gigantic scale.
They were 4m tall.
Some of them were 9m wide.
They must have looked absolutely massive in Howard's house,
but they were going to make an even bigger impact than that.
In 1616, Howard sold his tapestries to King James.
And they were hung at the heart of political power,
in the House of Lords.
By the late 18th century, the tapestries had become
an integral part of Westminster.
Not only were they a reminder of the great historical event,
they were also being used as propaganda in their own right.
In 1798, Britain was threatened by another European invasion,
this time from Napoleonic France.
To inspire patriotism,
satirist James Gillray created a series of cartoons called
Consequences Of A Successful French Invasion.
Gillray shows French revolutionaries who've invaded England
tearing down the Armada tapestries.
This one is hacking at them with his sword.
This one is setting fire to them,
and here are the familiar words about the defeat
of the Spanish invincible Armada.
England's great triumph over a European enemy
is really what's being torn down here,
and with it one of the founding mythologies
of England's national story.
In 1834, Gillray's vision of burning tapestries
became a reality.
A fire swept through Westminster
and they were destroyed,
but a plan soon emerged to recreate
the tapestries as paintings for the new
Victorian Palace of Westminster.
Whose artistic vision do we see here in this
really rich, gold-encrusted interior?
Well, the Fine Arts Commission were tasked with decorating
the entire palace, but it was Prince Albert
as the chair of the commission
who really drove the direction of the artistic works that we see here.
This room was selected to be a Tudor room.
So the scenes that you see around the room
are various scenes from Tudor history.
These are then topped with a series of Tudor portraits.
And then all of this is topped off with the views of the Armada.
And at the centre of the entire room we have this enormous statue
of Queen Victoria herself, by Gibson.
It's pretty Tudor-tastic in here. It certainly is!
I think it's very telling because there's been a lot
of British history that was available to them to revive,
but no, they went for the Tudor age.
That seemed like the most potent, the most exciting age for them
to associate themselves with.
Well, the Armada's seen as the most important
British naval victory in history,
and so, by highlighting a link to that,
showing the enormous naval power of Britain
in the Victorian age.
She thought, "l'd like a little bit of that glory to rub off on me."
Absolutely. I mean, having Victoria's enormous statue
in this space is drawing a very clear line
between Victoria herself and all of her Tudor forebears.
This is about showing the continuous link between a sort of golden age
of British monarchy, of Elizabeth I
and the relatively, at this point relatively new Queen Victoria.
For the Victorians, the Armada signalled the start
of the British Empire.
In the 19th century, Britannia ruled the waves
and heroic tales about the Armada
seemed to offer a connection to England's past.
The story of British sea power began with Drake's game of bowls
and led to this massive empire.
The Victorians pushed the naval triumph back
into the national consciousness.
Monuments and art celebrated Sir Francis Drake...
...and Elizabethan sea dogs became the heroes of popular fiction.
As the empire flourished,
the Armada victory became a tale of British naval power and courage.
And THAT version of the story survived
even as the British Empire eventually crumbled.
Nearly 400 years after the Armada,
another female leader was keen
to align herself with the warrior queen.
I know that one or two men are prejudiced,
but after all, their prejudice is really so, so ridiculous.
I mean, I say to some of them sometimes,
"My goodness! It's as well you didn't live in the time
"of Queen Elizabeth I, isn't it?"
After all, I wonder if we should
have grown to such a fantastic nation
if we hadn't had people like her?
In January 1976,
Margaret Thatcher gave a speech called Britain Awake.
It was a call to arms for Britain to stand up to communism
and Russian aggression.
Now, in response to the speech,
a Soviet newspaper, The Red Star,
came up with a nickname for Margaret Thatcher.
It was the Iron Lady.
She was quick to respond to this,
and a week later she made another speech, defending herself
with what seems to be an allusion to Elizabeth I.
LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE
LAUGHTER
APPLAUSE
She, too, had a feminine exterior
hiding the heart and stomach of a king.
The Iron Lady moniker would stick
and so too would the image of Thatcher as warrior leader
at the centre of the action amongst her troops.
Jenny, how does it seem to you that Margaret Thatcher
used the idea of Elizabeth I in her self-presentation?
Elizabeth I was a phenomenal person
for putting herself forward,
knowing how to dress, knowing how to behave,
knowing how to speak, knowing how to be feminine and warlike.
And when Thatcher put herself up onto a tank, she was doing
exactly what Elizabeth I had done at Tilbury.
Whenever I drive past Tilbury, a little thrill goes through me,
and has done since I was a teenager
and I learned about Elizabeth I on her white charger,
delivering that amazing speech that, you know,
she had the body of a weak and feeble woman,
but the heart and stomach of a king.
And I remember thinking as a teenager, "Wow, that is amazing!"
And then when I looked at Thatcher I thought,
she has exactly that same sense of femininity
and having to play on her femininity to quite a degree.
Whether Thatcher thought "Hmm, maybe
"l could be like Elizabeth l," I don't know,
but when Elizabeth sat on that charger
and made her wonderful speech,
you can draw a direct line to Thatcher sitting on a tank.
Elizabeth's Tilbury visit has become a touchstone of history,
but it's a touchstone built on shaky foundations.
Now, the Tilbury speech that everybody loves,
does it not matter to you that it didn't really quite happen
in the way that we like to think that it did?
I know it's questionable,
but I will not question it.
That image of a woman being powerful
and taking control and being proud of her power,
and knowing how to express it, is a myth that...
I don't believe it's a myth. I think it's true.
So even if it's a myth, it's a good myth for us to have.
It's a very good myth.
Take that, history!
Quite!
Margaret Thatcher understood the power of the Armada legend
and, even after she left office, she continued to use
Elizabethan history for her own purposes.
In 1998, the Chilean dictator General Pinochet
was held under house arrest in England.
Spain wanted to extradite him
to face trial for human rights crimes.
Margaret Thatcher took on the Spanish
and campaigned for his release.
When Pinochet was declared unfit to stand trial and sent home,
his plane was stopped on the runway to take delivery
of a gift from Margaret Thatcher.
It was a plate commemorating the defeat of the Spanish Armada.
It came with a personal note from Thatcher.
"With your return to Chile," she wrote,
"Spain's attempt at judicial colonialism has been decisively and,
"l trust, permanently rebuffed."
Now, we don't know what Pinochet made of his plate,
but we do know that the Spanish weren't impressed by all this.
Their foreign minister said that Thatcher
needed her head examining.
It's easy to see why the British have continued to use the story
of our triumph over Spain as a powerful weapon.
But what if it that victory is built on sand?
History paints the Spanish Armada
as the end of the story.
Peace and unity come to England
as the Spanish ships are broken by the storm.
But that's just another big fib because it's not the end
of the story of the Spanish Armada.
By the end of 1588,
Elizabethan England was planning a Counter Armada.
The war with Spain was unfinished business.
Around half of Philip's ships had made it home
and were now being repaired.
So, in 1589, Sir Francis Drake led an attack on Spain.
His orders were to destroy what was left of Spain's fleet,
invade Spanish-owned Portugal
and put a Portuguese king on the throne.
But the expedition failed.
England's Counter Armada was a disaster.
Today, English people have forgotten the story of the Counter Armada.
Was it well known at the time, in the 16th century?
The pamphlets downplayed the failure and denounced negative accounts
of the expedition as malicious slander.
Our propaganda was better? Yes?
Yeah, of course.
So, we English people,
we like to think that England beat Spain.
We won! But it's not that simple, is it?
The Spanish Armada was just one battle in a war
that outlasted Elizabeth and Philip,
and the heroic legend would last even longer.
For over 400 years,
the triumphant story of the Spanish Armada
has armed Britain with a sense of confidence,
ambition and cocky independence.
As our own farewell to the European Union,
The Sun have projected our own message onto the side
of the White Cliffs of Dover.
The Armada is part of the bedrock of our national story.
Its rhetoric informs the speeches of any leader seeking
to galvanise the nation.
No-one in the last few centuries has succeeded
in betting against the pluck and nerve and ambition
of this country.
The story of the Spanish Armada,
as told by the Elizabethans
and retold by generations since,
has a powerful legacy.
It's been manipulated by monarchs,
artists and politicians for centuries.
But it remains an inspiring national myth
that reassures us in times of crisis.
It's been used to convince us
that our little island can take on superpowers,
that we come from a line of cool-headed
and inspirational leaders.
That, small as we are,
we can still play a mighty role on the world stage.
Even in a secular age,
it seems like English people, British people, feel special,
marked out for greatness.
And, whether it's true or not,
the drama of that defeat of the Armada
gives us the confidence to believe in ourselves.
Who knows where that potent mix
of fact and fantasy and fibs
may take us next?
In the next programme, Queen Anne comes to the throne
and helps create Great Britain.
She's remembered by history as fat and foolish.
But was she the victim of character assassination
by her liberal enemies?
Sarah chose to drag Anne's name through the mud
and to maintain her own reputation in the process.