ABSTRACT
The Spanish Armada of 1588, though a disastrous defeat for Spain, was, as Geoffrey Parker has noted, a considerable psychological success. Well into the seventeenth century, the reputation of Spanish power and her presumed designs against Protestant England led Englishmen to fear the coming of a new armada. Twice in the middle of James I’s reign such anxiety became very intense and led to armada scares—the first at the time of the match, opposed by Spain, between James’s daughter Elizabeth and Frederick V of the Palatinate (1612–1613)—and the second in 1614 when new troubles in the disputed succession in the Cleves-Jülich region of Germany threatened possible war. England’s sense of vulnerability, in the meantime, was exacerbated by the death of Prince Henry, James’s very popular, anti-Spanish heir. In the first case the king held firm, but in the second lack of money forced him into a very passive role. A wave of anti-Catholicism accompanied both scares. Three little-used sources—dispatches from the Flemish ambassador Boisschot, reports of the English Catholic secular clergy to Rome, and commentary by the Spanish missionary in London Luisa de Carvajal—add some balance to the array of English Protestant sources.
