Elizabethan Warfare and Border Society

Why England fought Spain

Elizabeth I’s war with Spain began in 1585. It continued throughout the rest of her reign and ended in 1604, a year after her death. Its impact therefore extended beyond any single battle: maintaining a prolonged conflict placed continuing demands on royal finances and the English economy.

England and Spain had become rivals over religion, trade and control of the Netherlands. Elizabeth ruled Protestant England, while Philip II of Spain defended Catholicism. English attacks on Spanish overseas commerce increased tension, as did Elizabeth’s support for Dutch rebels resisting Spanish rule.

The Netherlands mattered to England for practical reasons as well as religion. Its ports were important markets for English cloth, and a powerful Spanish army across the Channel threatened English security. Through the Treaty of Nonsuch in 1585, Elizabeth committed troops to support the Dutch rebels. The Earl of Leicester’s campaign achieved little militarily, but English intervention helped keep the revolt alive. England was now openly challenging Spanish power in Europe.

When assessing warfare, it helps to distinguish the reputation of the monarch, the resources of government and the experiences of ordinary people. These could be affected differently. A ruler’s prestige was not the same thing as the Crown’s ability to pay its bills.

The Armada: security and royal prestige

In 1588, Philip II sent the Spanish Armada to join the Duke of Parma’s army in the Netherlands and transport it to England. A successful invasion threatened Elizabeth’s rule and England’s Protestant religious settlement.

The invasion plan failed through a combination of English action, Spanish difficulties and weather. English fireships scattered the Armada at Calais, and English gunnery inflicted damage at Gravelines. The Spanish fleet could not successfully join Parma’s army and retreated around Scotland and Ireland, where storms wrecked many ships.

Preventing invasion protected Elizabeth’s throne and English independence. It also greatly increased her prestige: the respect and reputation she enjoyed as monarch. Her appearance before troops at Tilbury, celebratory portraits and medals helped present her as the defender of the nation. The victory was portrayed as evidence of God’s favour towards Protestant England. This was an interpretation promoted by the victors, rather than a complete explanation of the military outcome.

Yet the Armada’s defeat did not destroy Spanish power or end the war. England’s own expedition to Portugal in 1589 failed to capture Lisbon, and many participants died from disease. Further Spanish Armadas in 1596 and 1597 were scattered by storms. Elizabeth’s reputation benefited enormously from 1588, but the continuing conflict exposed the limits of English military power.

Paying for war changed relations with Parliament

War against Spain was a major cause of the Crown’s financial difficulties. The Nine Years’ War in Ireland, 1593–1603, added a separate and substantial burden. By the 1590s, Elizabeth’s expenditure has been estimated at around twice her revenue. This was a problem of sustaining expenditure, not simply finding money for one expedition.

Elizabeth had to call Parliament more frequently to request subsidies: grants of taxation approved by Parliament. Parliament’s role in approving taxation therefore mattered increasingly to the conduct of war. The grants helped fund royal policy, but repeated demands were resented, and tax assessments often understated the wealth available to tax.

The Crown also sold land to raise money. This provided immediate cash, but land sold could no longer produce future royal income. A short-term solution thus weakened the Crown’s longer-term financial resources, including those inherited by Elizabeth’s successors.

Another method was granting monopolies: exclusive trading rights given to individuals in return for fees. These brought money to the Crown but became deeply unpopular. The monopolies controversy of 1601 revealed Parliament’s growing impatience with royal financial expedients. Warfare did not remove Elizabeth’s authority, but its cost made governing more dependent on obtaining money and managing political opposition.

Privateers took the conflict overseas

Privateers were private sailors who attacked enemy shipping with government backing and seized ships or goods as prizes. A letter of marque gave official written permission, although Elizabeth sometimes offered informal support instead. This allowed her to share in profits while publicly denying responsibility for attacks on Spain.

Francis Drake attacked Spanish silver routes across Panama in 1572–1573. During his circumnavigation of the globe in 1577–1580, he raided Spanish ports on the South American coast and captured the treasure ship Cacafuego, which carried silver. These attacks showed that Spain’s overseas wealth was vulnerable to English ships. Elizabeth received a share of the profits and later knighted Drake, associating royal prestige with his achievements.

John Hawkins challenged Spanish control of Caribbean commerce through voyages in 1562, 1564 and 1567–1568. These involved the capture, transportation and sale of enslaved Africans. The profits depended on coercion and human suffering, not simply adventurous trade. Elizabeth supplied a ship for Hawkins’s second voyage and invested in it. His third ended disastrously when Spanish forces attacked the English fleet at San Juan de Ulúa in 1568, destroying or capturing most of its ships. Hawkins and Drake escaped, but the attack hardened hostility towards Spain.

As relations deteriorated, raiding became more openly part of royal warfare. Drake led an expedition against Spanish Caribbean territories in 1585–1586. In 1587, Drake’s authorised raid on Cadiz destroyed around thirty Spanish ships and seized supplies, helping delay the Armada by about a year. Privateering could therefore contribute to English security as well as bring wealth, although earlier raids had also helped provoke Spanish hostility.

Privateering profits and disrupted trade

Privateering offered opportunities to profit from conflict rather than relying entirely on ordinary commercial trade. Drake’s circumnavigation brought large returns to its investors, while captured Spanish silver and goods benefited the Crown and successful participants. Experienced sailors also contributed to England’s naval effectiveness against the Armada.

However, gains from raids were unreliable. They also created diplomatic problems. A profitable raid for its participants was not the same as a dependable source of income for the Crown or prosperity for the country as a whole.

By the 1590s, better-defended Spanish convoys made profitable attacks more difficult. Drake and Hawkins’s final Caribbean expedition failed, and both died from disease in 1595–1596. Such expeditions offered sailors the possibility of wealth but also exposed them to combat, capture and fatal illness.

From 1585, war disrupted legitimate commerce with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands. The English cloth trade suffered renewed disruption. Some people could gain from seizing enemy goods while merchants involved in normal trade faced losses. The economic impact of warfare was therefore uneven, rather than simply beneficial or harmful to everyone.

Ordinary people faced overlapping pressures

The costs of war coincided with particularly severe hardship in the 1590s. Four successive harvest failures between 1594 and 1597 pushed food prices up by more than a third. Falling real wages meant that earnings bought less, even where people remained employed. Plague outbreaks in 1592–1593 compounded the crisis.

War costs and disrupted commerce added pressure, but warfare did not cause the failed harvests or plague. The severity of hardship came from several problems occurring together. Poorer households were especially vulnerable because necessities such as food absorbed much of their income.

The Poor Laws of 1597 and 1601 were significant government responses to this wider social crisis. They developed a lasting framework for parish poor relief, although their immediate effectiveness was limited and enforcement was uneven. They should not be treated as a response to war alone.

Warfare shaped a distinctive border society

On the English–Scottish borders, the impact of conflict was felt close to home. During c.1500–c.1600, border communities lived with the legacy of repeated warfare: soldiers had plundered supplies, burned settlements and damaged livelihoods. Insecurity encouraged people to seek protection from powerful families rather than rely only on their monarch’s government.

Border reivers were raiders organised around kinship groups, including the Armstrongs, Elliots, Grahams and Scotts. They stole livestock and goods, kidnapped people and pursued long-running feuds. Reiving was not simply Scots attacking English people: neighbours could raid neighbours, and family connections and cooperation could cross the national boundary. Loyalty to kin could compete with loyalty to the Crown.

Reivers ranged from powerful landowners to farm workers. Some combined raiding with agriculture; others raided when times were particularly hard. Livestock could be driven away and provided valuable food and wealth. Reiving was especially common from autumn to spring, when people and animals were concentrated in the valleys.

Poverty and defence could reinforce one another. To obtain enough armed men, landowners encouraged settlement on poor land known as the Wastes, offering low rents in return for defensive service. Such land could not adequately support large populations, so some families turned to raiding. Meanwhile, successful raiding could enrich powerful families and strengthen their local influence.

Raids changed homes and livelihoods

The danger was not abstract. In 1587, a complaint from Temmen reported that raiders had murdered three men, taken eleven prisoners, destroyed property and stolen one hundred cattle and oxen. In 1590, Peter Armstrong raided the Tweddle family’s bastle at Birdoswald, burning and damaging its doors and stealing forty cattle and oxen, forty sheep and other goods.

Such losses threatened a household’s ability to survive. Animals represented food, farming resources and wealth; losing them damaged future livelihoods as well as causing immediate hardship. Murder, kidnapping and feuds made personal security uncertain.

Families with sufficient resources built defensible homes. A bastle was a fortified stone farmhouse with thick walls, livestock sheltered on the ground floor and living accommodation above. Access to the upper floor could be by a ladder that was pulled up when danger approached. Higher-status households also built pele towers, fortified tower houses. Protection therefore shaped the buildings people lived in and the way they organised everyday life.

The persistence of insecurity is illustrated by the antiquarian William Camden, who in 1599 avoided surveying part of Hadrian’s Wall because he feared robbers. Raiding restricted movement as well as threatening farms.

Border authority combined law and local defence

Both kingdoms divided their borderlands into East, Middle and West Marches, making six districts in total. Each had a warden responsible for keeping order. March laws and Truce Days, when grievances could be considered, provided ways to manage disputes across the border.

In the 1550s, Lord Wharton, Warden of the English West March, organised a defensive watch system. Around a thousand men were needed to watch routes such as fords, valleys and hilltops along the English border during the colder months. Local gentlemen had to arm and organise their people. Defence thus imposed continuing duties on border communities.

A victim could also begin a hot trod within six days to recover stolen goods, including by crossing the border. Horns, cries and burning turf carried on a spear openly signalled the pursuit’s legitimate purpose. Payments to powerful neighbours for protection and recovery of cattle offered another form of security, but could become protection rackets.

These arrangements show that the borderlands were not entirely without law. However, raids and feuds continued despite wardens, watches and legal procedures. In 1603, James VI of Scotland also became James I of England. This Union of the Crowns began a change in border government: March laws were abolished and stronger repression included executions and deportations. It did not mean England and Scotland had become one state, or that all border violence ended immediately.

Weighing the consequences

Elizabethan warfare strengthened royal prestige and protected England from invasion, while English intervention helped sustain resistance to Spain in the Netherlands. Privateering brought wealth to some participants and challenged Spanish overseas power. Yet continuing expenditure, disrupted trade and reduced future royal income left the Crown under strain and complicated relations with Parliament.

For border communities, war and raiding shaped livelihoods, family loyalties, housing and local government over generations. Across both settings, military achievement and private profit could coexist with insecurity and hardship. The consequences depended on whose power, wealth or safety was being considered.

Spain, security and prestige

• 1585: Treaty of Nonsuch committed English troops to support Dutch rebels against Spain.
• 1588: Armada defeated; invasion prevented and Elizabeth’s prestige strengthened through celebrations and Protestant propaganda.
• 1589: English expedition to Portugal failed; disease killed many participants.
• War continued until 1604, beyond Elizabeth’s death in 1603.

Finance and Parliament

• Spanish and Irish warfare strained royal finances.
• More parliamentary subsidies increased the importance of Parliament’s financial support.
• Crown land sales raised immediate cash but reduced future income.
• 1601: monopolies controversy exposed parliamentary discontent.

Privateers, economy and people

• Drake: Panama raids, 1572–1573; captured Spanish silver during circumnavigation, 1577–1580; Cadiz raid, 1587, delayed Armada preparations.
• Hawkins: profitable slave-trading voyages; fleet devastated at San Juan de Ulúa, 1568.
• Privateering brought wealth and naval experience, but provoked Spain; later profits declined as convoys improved.
• War disrupted trade with Spain and the Spanish Netherlands, including cloth exports.
• 1594–1597: failed harvests intensified hardship; plague also contributed. War was not the sole cause.

Border society, c.1500–c.1600

• Warfare and reiving damaged livelihoods and personal security; kinship loyalties could cross the border.
• Temmen, 1587: murders, prisoners and livestock losses. Birdoswald, 1590: Tweddle bastle raided and animals stolen.
• Bastles and pele towers protected households; poor land and defensive obligations encouraged some families to raid.
• Six Marches had wardens; March laws, Truce Days, watches and hot trods sought to control insecurity.
• 1603: Union of the Crowns began stronger repression, not instant peace or a single united state.

Overall judgement

Royal prestige and private profits increased in some circumstances, but financial strain and insecurity persisted. Distinguish short-term gains from lasting costs, and winners from those who suffered.