Journal of Strategic Studies

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Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea: The

Sixteenth Century Origins of Modern Maritime
Strategy

Beatrice Heuser

To cite this article: Beatrice Heuser (2015): Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea: The
Sixteenth Century Origins of Modern Maritime Strategy, Journal of Strategic Studies, DOI:
10.1080/01402390.2015.1104670

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 The Journal of Strategic Studies, 2015
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01402390.2015.1104670

Regina Maris and the Command

of the Sea: The Sixteenth Century
Origins of Modern Maritime
Strategy
Downloaded by [University of Cambridge] at 13:32 26 December 2015

BEATRICE HEUSER

Department of International Relations, University of Reading, Reading, UK

ABSTRACT The concept of the command of the sea has its roots in medieval
notions of the sovereignty of coastal waters, as claimed by several monarchs and
polities of Europe. In the sixteenth century, a surge of intellectual creativity,
especially in Elizabethan England, fused this notion with the Thucydidean term
‘thalassocracy’ – the rule of the sea. In the light of the explorations of the oceans,
this led to a new conceptualisation of naval warfare, developed in theory and
then put into practice. This falsifies the mistaken but widespread assumption that
there was no significant writing on naval strategy before the nineteenth century.

KEY WORDS: Maritime Strategy, Naval Strategy, Command of the Sea,

Blockade, guerre de course/commerce raiding, Fleet in Being, Freedom of the Seas

On the eve of the French Revolution, the French Viscount de Grenier in a

treatise on naval warfare accused previous writers on the subject of having
paid attention to little besides orders of battle (not even ‘tactics’ let alone
‘strategy’, as the latter term had not yet been introduced into the French
language: ‘tactics’ at the time covered both).1 Writing in the 1930s, his
countryman Admiral Raoul Castex claimed that there was an ‘almost
complete void in the writing on naval Strategy before the French Revolution,
which stands in utter contrast to the work of authors writing about the army
in the same period’.2 Previously, I was inclined to agree with them.3 But
1
Jacques Raymond, vicomte de Grenier, L’Art de Guerre sur Mer, ou Tactique navale,
assujettie à de nouveaux principes et à un nouvel ordre de bataille (Paris: Fermin Didot,
1787).
2
Amiral Raoul Castex, Théories stratégiques, 2nd edn, Vol. 1 (Paris: SEGMC, 1937),
31; see also 37–39.
3
Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 208.

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

 2 Beatrice Heuser

further digging in libraries and manuscript collections reveals that there was
in fact some very impressive thinking on the use of navies for higher political
purposes, in the context of an overall strategy using a variety of tools, in the
sixteenth century.
Literature about naval warfare can be traced back to classical times, but
primarily in one of two forms: either as a historical record of wars, or in
manuals of a prescriptive nature, in the tradition of Vegetius.4 Christine de
Pizan (c. 1364–1430) and the French admiral Jean V de Bueil (c.1404–77,
the ‘Scourge of the English’), in their treatment of naval matters (mainly
concerning the construction of ships) did little but recycle Vegetius.5 From
the sixteenth century onwards, however, we find books that emancipate
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themselves from this tradition.6 Most of the writing is quite technical, but
we can also find some real examples of strategic thinking, if strategy is
defined as ‘a comprehensive way to try to pursue political ends, including
the threat or actual use of force, in a dialectic of wills’.7 What I mean by that
is the use of military tools and also other tools – such as trade, alliances,
money – for larger political purposes – such as the security of one’s own
throne and country, or even the protection of Protestantism throughout
Europe. Some of these can be found in England, and most of the principal
options for the use of navies were recognised and indeed applied by English
practitioners-cum-thinkers in the late sixteenth century.8
This article draws on sophisticated articulations of maritime strategy of
the late sixteenth century. It will home in on one central concept – the
command of the sea – in the context of previous and later articulations of
this and related ideas. We shall begin by tracing the origins of the idea of any
country having ‘command of the sea’ or ‘ruling the ocean’, with a particular
focus on England and Britain. We shall illustrate how this concept came to

4
Chapter XIX of his Epitoma Rei militaris deals with the naumachia or de navalis
proelio.
5
Philippe Richardot, ‘Y a-t-il une pensée navale dans l’Occident médiéval?’, in Hervé
Coutau-Bégarie (ed), Evolution de la Pensée navale Vol. VII (Paris: Economica, 1999),
13–23.
6
Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, ‘L’émergence d’une Pensée navale en Europe au XVIe Siècle et
au Début du XVIIe Siècle’, in Hervé Coutau-Bégarie (ed.), Evolution de la Pensée
navale, Vol. 4 (Paris: Economica, 1994), 13–35; see also Philip Williams, ‘The Strategy
of Galley Warfare in the Mediterranean (1560–1630)’, in Enrique García Hernán and
Davide Maffi (eds), Guerra y Sociedad en la Monarquía Hispánica: Política, Estrategia
y Cultura en la Europa Moderna (1500–1700), Vol. 1, Política, estrategia, organization
y guerre en el mar (Madrid: Ediciones del Laberinto, 2006), 891–920; Enrique García
Hernan, ‘Tratadística militar’, in Luis Robot (ed.), Historia Militar de España III Edad
Moderna Part II Escenario europeo (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa 2013), 401–19.
7
Heuser, Evolution, 27f.
8
This by no means excludes the possibility that similar treasures are yet to be unearthed
in the archives of other countries.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 3

be used in debates about the best (naval) strategy to pursue in the Anglo-
Spanish War of the late sixteenth century. This was arguably the first ever
conflict with a global dimension – given English navigators’ exploits and the
global imperial aspirations of Philip II which they challenged.9 These, in
turn, were studied in detail by the key author who has formed our thinking
about naval and maritime strategy to this day, Sir Julian Corbett.

The Dual Roots of the Command of the Sea

In his great work on the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides let the Athenian
ruler Pericles muse, ‘Μέγα γαρ το της θαλάσσης κράτος,’ a phrase difficult
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to translate elegantly, roughly meaning, ‘The rule’ or ‘command of the

sea is indeed a great matter’ or ‘of great importance.’10 This work was
translated into Western European languages by the sixteenth century.11
Anglophone students who struggled with Greek, or indeed those who
had none, were helped by the fact that the Peloponnesian War was
translated into English for the first time in 1550 – admittedly via French
and thus not very satisfactorily, but well enough to serve students as a
crib. Significantly, as we shall see, the library of Trinity College,
Cambridge, still holds a copy of this translation, presumably acquired
soon after its publication.12 Thucydides’ account of Athens’s naval
exploits could thus influence English elite thinking about the possibilities
offered by navies, even if not all members of this elite were accomplished
Greek scholars. And this happened just as sail was winning the
competition over oar, and oceans were being ever more extensively
navigated.13 Admittedly, English and British claims to rule the sea pre-
date the impact of Thucydides. They were more modest, however, until
naval technological innovation with the admixture of Thucydidean
9
See Francis Drake’s claim of land on America’s western coast for the English crown as
‘Nova Albion’, in what now is California.
10
Thucydides I.143,20.
11
Laurentius Valla’s translation into Latin was printed in 1483. Half a century later
followed the oldest translation into French: L’histoire de Thucydide athenien, de la
guerre qui fut entre les Peloponesiens et Atheniens, trans. by Claude de Seyssel, Bishop
of Marseille and Archbishop of Turin (Paris: Josse Badius, 1527), which went through
several corrected editions; for the earliest Italian edition, see Gli otto libri di Thucydide
atheniese, delle guerre fatte tra popoli della Morea, et gli Atheniesi, trans. Francesco di
Soldo Strozzi Fiorentino (Venice: Vincenzo Vaugris, 1545) in the Vatican Library.
12
The Hystory Writtone by Thucidides the Athenyan of the Warre, whiche Was
betwene the Peloponesians and the Athenyans, trans. Thomas Nicolls (London: William
Tylle, 1550).
13
See also Andrew Lambert, ‘Sea Power’, in George Kassimeris and John Buckley (eds),
The Ashgate Research Companion to Modern Warfare (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010),
73–88.
 4 Beatrice Heuser

notions of thalassokratia resulted in a revolution in strategic thinking

before Britain, from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, rose to
become the world’s leading naval power.

Medieval Feudal Roots of Sovereignty of the Sea

The medieval roots of claims to sovereignty or overlordship of the sea lie
in the struggle of medieval monarchs to assert their superiority over their
noble vassals. While such claims were first compiled for England by an
early seventeenth-century antiquarian and archivist, John Selden, with
great political ambitions for himself and for his monarch, these early
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documents reflect medieval monarchs’ gradual construction of a royal

monopoly of the use of force, their assertion of supremacy over their own
barons and local chieftains, and their concern about equality with other
monarchs. Digging through the royal records of England, Selden found a
charter dating from as early as 964, in which the Anglo-Saxon king
Edgar styled himself king, emperor, and lord of all the islands of the
kingdom, of their populations, and of the oceans surrounding Britain.
The terms used here – basileus, imperator, dominus – all reflect medieval
concerns about prestige and rank.14 In the following centuries we find
references to ‘England’s old superiority (sovereignty) of the Sea’, suppo-
sedly preceding the possession of lands on the Continent.15 When in
1340, King Edward III won a naval victory over French ships at the
battle of Sluys on the coast of Flanders, he had a ‘noble’, a gold coin,
minted which showed him aboard a ship, carrying his sword as sign of
domination,16 much as previously kings and other rulers had shown
themselves either on thrones or on horseback, sword in hand (Figure 1).
A century later, a little book presenting political advice in the form of
a long poem, known as the Libelle of Englyshe Polycye (1436ff),
commented on the noble,

Ffor [sic] iiii [=four] thynges our noble sheueth to me,

Kying, shype, and swerde, and pouer of the see.17

14
Ioannis Seldeni, Mare Clausum sev de Dominio Maris Libri dvo (London: William
Stanesbeius for Richard Meighen, 1636), 337, published subsequently in English: John
Selden, Of the Dominion, or Ownership of the Sea, Two Books (London: William Du-
Gard, 1652). See also Thomas Wemyss Fulton, The Sovereignty of the Sea (Edinburgh:
William Blackwood, 1911), 27.
15
Quoted in Fulton, Sovereignty, 51f.
16
Clifford J. Rogers, War Cruel and Sharp: English Strategy under Edward III,
1327–1360 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2000).
17
Sir G. Warner (ed.), The Libelle of English Polycye (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1926).
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 5
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Figure 1. The noble of King Edward III.

Source: © the Trustees of the British Museum.

This ‘pouer of the see’ was crucial in assuring the communications of

Plantagenet rulers, first of the Angevin Empire, then of the areas
claimed and conquered by Edward III and Henry V in the Hundred
Years’ War.
There were practical implications of successive English monarchs’
claims to overlordship in their territorial waters, i.e. a band of water
along the coasts of their territorial possessions. Taxation was one of
them. We find an English royal ordinance of 1368 whereby all ships
passing near England should be taxed according to their tonnage.18
Exemptions from such duties (and thus the right to non-taxed fishing)
were granted to French fishermen in an ordinance of Henry IV, and by
Henry VI with regard to fishermen who were subjects of the Duchess of
Burgundy (by implication confirming that others still had to pay these
dues).19
Another practical implication was that foreign ships were required to
lower their single sail, or, if they had several, their top-sail, and strike
their flag to greet English ships, signalling submission, and permission
for the English to come and search the foreigner. We find this in the
Angevin Empire in an ordinance of King John of 1201. He commanded
that any ship was to be seized if it refused ‘at sea’ to lower its sail when
ordered to do so by an English ship. The point of this was that if it
lowered its sail (at the time usually only one), it could not get away

18
Sir John Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas, Proved by Records, History,
and the Municipall Lawes of this Kingdome, Written in the Yeare 1633 (London:
Humphrey Moseley, 1651), 65–67.
19
Ibid., 74–78.
 6 Beatrice Heuser

quickly and could be searched.20 Further examples can be found in the

reign of Henry IV.21 From then until the mid sixteenth century, the
twentieth-century historian Thomas Fulton found no further example
of enforcement. Even though Henry VIII had called himself ‘Lord of
these [English] seas’, it was only in 1549, under his son, that we have
records of English ships firing at Flemish men-of-war to force them to
give a salute. We have other examples, however, of discretion being
used.22
Yet in 1554, when King Philip II of Spain came to England to join his
newly wedded wife, Catholic Queen Mary I (Tudor), we read of an
impressive act of English bravado. As the English elite was torn apart
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over the Catholic marriage of their queen, Admiral Lord William

Howard gave orders to open fire on the Spanish fleet, as Philip’s flag
was flying unlowered on the Spanish Admiral’s ship. This was an insult
that would continue to rankle with the Habsburg monarch. Again, the
English antagonised Philip when in 1570, after the death of Mary, the
ship carrying his new bride, Anne of Austria, drew into Plymouth when
she was en route for her wedding.23 Again, the English fired at her ships
because they did not strike sails in the requested fashion.
The English kings were by no means the only ones to make such
claims to sovereignty over territorial waters. Eric of Pomerania (King of
Denmark as Eric VII, King of Norway as Eric III, and later counted as
King Eric XIII of Sweden), claimed overlordship over the Sound (as he
like his adoptive mother, Queen Margaret I, before him ruled the lands
on either side). In 1429, Eric turned this into practical policy by
instituting a Sound Duty that ships passing through this area had to
pay until 1857. Castles constructed or fortified in his reign assured
Denmark’s ability to enforce these duties.24 Also, in the late fifteenth
century, French monarchs disputed the English claim to overlordship of
the Channel.25 After Queen Mary I of England lost Calais, her last
possession on the Continental mainland, to the French crown, the
French kings Henri II and Henri III in 1555 and 1584, respectively,
insisted that all vessels strike their sails to French ships when they met

20
Quoted in Fulton, Sovereignty, 40.
21
Ibid., 43, 207.
22
Ibid., 116f.
23
Ibid., 117.
24
Palle Lauring, A History of Denmark, trans. David Hohnen (Copenhagen: Høst,
1995), 110f.
25
Jhon Coke, The Debate betwene the Heraldes of Englande and Fraunce, Compyled
by Jhon Coke, Clarke of the Kynges Rcognysaunce, or Vulgerly, Called Clarke of the
Statutes of the Staple of Westmynster, and Fynyshed the Yere of Our Lorde MDL, 30ff,
62ff. The original French text dates from the fifteenth century.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 7

them at sea.26 By the seventeenth century if not earlier, the Russian Tsar
forced all fishermen ‘within his seas, though it may be many Leagues
from the Maine, to pay him tribute’, as Sir John Boroughs recorded.
Boroughs claimed that such dues were also exacted by the Duke of
Medina Sidonia in Spain, by all princes of Italy whose territories
bordered the Mediterranean, and by the Dutch with respect to their
own fishermen. 27
The generally formulated medieval and early modern claim to
sovereignty of the sea, however, at best applied to what would later
become known as ‘territorial waters’.28 Prior to the sixteenth century,
English monarchs did not extend their claim beyond such waters.29
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Even in the early seventeenth century, James I (1603–25) only laid claim
to control of ‘his seas’ and ‘streams’, and the ‘chambers’ (bays) along
the coasts of Britain. This is of course a far cry from claiming to rule the
oceans of the world, or a Thucydidean command of the sea, unsurpris-
ingly, given its ideational roots in segnorialism. James’s successor, by
contrast, was pushed by writers of the period (especially John Selden) to
use the term ‘Sovereignty of the Seas’ in a more extensive fashion, and
pompously called one of his ships Sovereign of the Sea.30
Yet it was the late sixteenth century that provided the revolution in
English thinking and writing about naval strategy. Hostile to Spanish
Catholicism and its strategies on the Continent, shocked by the Spanish
invasion scare of 1588 and the triumph over the Spanish Armada,
members of the English elite opened their minds to grander ideas. The
Armada painting of Queen Elizabeth I in its several versions is a perfect
illustration: we see the elegant right hand of the Tudor monarch
reposing lightly on the globe, or, to be precise, on North America, the
very region the Spanish monarchs proclaimed to be out of bounds for
their European peers’ adventurous explorers and colonisers (Figure 2).
The symbolism of this painting mirrors Elizabethan writing about the
command of the sea in all its semantic variants.

The Anglo-Spanish War and Its Strategists

As we have seen, the claim to sovereignty over essentially territorial
waters was not unique to the English. The most extreme claim of this
26
Fulton, Sovereignty, 117, 277.
27
Boroughs, The Soveraignty, 83f.
28
Sebastian Sobiecki, The Sea and Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: D.S.
Brewer, 2008), 140, 141, 143.
29
Sir Travers Twiss (ed.), The Black Book of the Admiralty, Vol. 1 (London: Longman,
1871), 58.
30
Fulton, Sovereignty, 9–11, 16f, 28, 118.
 8 Beatrice Heuser
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Figure 2. Woburn Abbey Version of Elizabeth I (Armada Portrait) by George Gower.

Source: © His Grace the Duke of Bedford and the Trustees of the Bedford Estate.

sort was made by Spain and Portugal, in the immediate context of the
discovery by Columbus in 1492 of the western passage to what was
originally thought to be Asia. The monarchs of Spain and Portugal asked
the Spanish-born Borgia pope Alexander VI for adjudication, and his bull
Inter caetera of 1493, modified slightly by the Treaties of Tordesillas
(1494) and Saragossa (1496), divided the extra-European world with
two longitudinal lines. Seen from Europe, America West of the western
line was to go to Spain, territories between the two lines (from modern
Brazil eastwards around the globe to Macao, but generally taken to
exclude the Mediterranean and its littoral) to Portugal, and anything east
of the eastern line (above all, the Philippines) again to Spain. No other
state was to meddle and claim land in the New World. Any ship ‘crossing
the line’ by sailing from Europe to the new world (or indeed to any other
part of the globe), as Queen Elizabeth’s voyagers so often would, for
purposes other than mere exploration, would be accused of having
broken international law.
It seems that educated Spaniards were just as aware of the Thucydidean
term thalassokratia in its various possible translations as were their English
contemporaries. A manuscript translation into Spanish had been in
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 9

circulation since the fourteenth century, and a printed translation into

Spanish since 1564.31 Given Philip’s ambitions, we are not surprised to find
Spaniards citing the concept of rule of the sea. For example, Don García de
Toledo, Philip’s Viceroy for Sicily, wrote to him six years before the epic
showdown in Lepanto that such a battle for the Mediterranean seemed
inevitable, ‘for as Your Majesty claims the dominion of the sea, and the
Turk claims it, it is not possible to exclude that this dominion will come to be
proven by naval battle’.32
Also Don Bernardino de Mendoza, Philip II’s one-time ambassador to
London and conspirator to put Mary Stuart on Elizabeth’s throne (for
which he was expelled as persona non grata) would advise Philip’s son,
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then still the crown prince, that empires such as his father’s and his were
held together by ‘being Lordes of the sea’.33 Mendoza went on to outline
all the advantages of naval power to Spain’s particular type of empire,
proffering the interesting view that empires were more likely to survive if
they consisted of ‘sundry Prouinces’ connected only by the sea than ‘in one
bodie, where corruption once entring causeth a farr greater ruyne, then in
the deuided, and distant, being seldome times all infected at once with one
morion [violencia in the original], as it may fall out where they stande
vnited’.34 The command of the sea and other advantages created by sea
power were thus also fully part of Spain’s strategic thinking, while
Spaniards recognised that several powers could claim it at least in the
Mediterranean and in waters around Europe. Spanish political-strategic
thought was, however, dominated by greater ambitions than the mere
establishment of the rule of the oceans: the restoration of the unity of
Christianity, and the dream of universal monarchy.

31
Guido delle Colonne, ‘Discursos sacados de la Historia de la guerra del Peloponeso’,
Biblioteca nacional de España MSS/10801 (2nd half of 14th century); Historia de
Thucydides: que trata de las guerras entre los Peloponesos y Atheni eses: la qual allēde
las grandes y notables hazañas por mar y por tierra, delos vnos y delos otros, y de sus
aliados y cofederados, esta llena de oraciones y razonamiētos prudentes y auisados a
proposito de paz y de Guerra, trans. Diego Gracian (Salamanca: Iuan de Canoua,
1564).
32
‘. . . porque pretiendo V.M. el señorío de la mar, y pretendiéndolo el turco, no es
posible excusar que no se venga á conocer esta superioridad por batalla de mar . . .’
Letter of 31 May 1565, in Marquis of Pidal and Miguel Salvá (eds), Colección de
Documentos Inéditos para la Historia de España (Madrid: Imprenta de la Viuda de
Calero, 1856), Vol. 29, Part I, 167.
33
Don Bernardino de Mendoca/Mendoza, Teórica y práctica de la guerra (Madrid:
1595, Amberes: Emprenta Plantiniana 1596, Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa 1998),
128, Sir Edwarde Hoby, trs, Theorique and practise of warre (Middelburg: Richard
Schilders 1597), 148.
34
Ibid. This idea Mendoza owed to the Italian strategist Giovanni Botero: Della Ragion
di Stato Libri Dieci (Venice: Giolitti, 1589), 15.
 10 Beatrice Heuser

Philip II’s Power and Ambitions

Interstate relations in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were
overshadowed by the house of Habsburg’s bid for world rule, for a
monarchia universalis surpassing that of any former empire, since it
could now span the globe. Already Emperor Charles V, who united the
lands (including those in the new world) left to him by his Spanish
mother and those inherited from his Habsburg father, could claim to
rule an empire in which the sun did not set. Even when Charles V
divided his heritage between his brother Ferdinand I (to whom he left
the eastern Habsburg lands and the imperial crown) and his son Philip
II (to whom he left Spain, the Low Countries, the Mediterranean
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possessions, and the colonies), the heritage received by Philip was

colossal. Moreover, through his marriage with Mary Tudor, Philip
hoped to gain England for his heirs, a hope frustrated when she died
childless in 1558. But as king of Naples and Sicily, duke of Milan from
1554, ruler of the Low Countries from 1555, king of Spain from 1556,
and, through another quirk of fate in the roulette of royal (in)fertility,
heir and successor to a childless king of Portugal from 1580, Philip was
the most powerful monarch in Europe. His dangerous ambitions for
global, indeed universal, hegemony seemed confirmed with the medal
he had struck in 1580, depicting a horse poised to leap off the globe and
into space, with the modest little caption, ‘non sufficit orbis’, the world
is not enough (Figure 3).
Queen Elizabeth clearly knew of this medal,35 as did Sir Francis
Drake.36 Only in the following century would Philip II’s eponymous
grandson become known as the Rey Planeta (King of the Planet), but
the symbolism linking dominion over the entire planet with the Spanish
monarch was already well established in the iconography of Philip II’s
reign.
Nor had Philip quite given up his hopes of bringing England back
into the Catholic fold, and of securing its succession for his own
dynasty. Initially, after Mary Tudor’s death, the widowed Philip
wooed her sister Elizabeth, but he was turned down. Soon Elizabeth
was seen as a danger to Spain’s great Catholic programme. Spain’s
ambassador to England, Alvaro de Quadra, in 1563 wrote to his
king about Elizabeth: ‘This woman desires to make use of religion in
order to excite rebellion in the whole world . . . If she had the power
today she would sow heresy broadcast in all your Majesty’s
35
David Armitage, ‘The Elizabethan Idea of Empire’, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, 6th series, 14 (2004), 275f.
36
Carlos José Hernando Sánchez, ‘Non sufficit orbis? Las estrategias de la Monarquía
de España’, in Luis Robot (ed.), Historia Militar de España III Edad Moderna Part II
Escenario europeo (Madrid: Ministerio de Defensa 2013), 30.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 11
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Figure 3. Medal of King Philip II of Spain (1580).

Source: © the Trustees of the British Museum.

dominions, and set them ablaze without compunction.’37 Swayed by

evidence of Elizabeth’s support for the Protestant rebels against his
rule in the Netherlands, Philip proceeded to back the Catholic Mary
Queen of Scots as a pretender to the English crown. After her
conviction of plotting against Elizabeth with Philip’s subsequent
ambassador (see above), and Mary Stuart’s execution in 1587,
Philip claimed the English crown for his daughter, the Infanta
Isabella Clara Eugenia (for whom he had also, and equally unsuc-
cessfully, claimed the French crown when Protestant Henri IV
Bourbon first succeeded to the French throne).38
According to historian Geoffrey Parker, Philip II’s overall strategy was,
first, to preserve his inheritance, threatened especially by the insurgence of
the Protestant Dutch in quest of independence. Secondly, he tried to keep
what he had acquired in his own lifetime: the English crown, and that of
Portugal. Thirdly, he was encouraged to follow in the Spanish tradition of
defending Christianity against the infidel, the long-standing leitmotif of the
Reconquista, but now also to be the defensor fidei, champion of – by now
worldwide – Catholicism against the Protestant heresies, with the ultimate
aspiration of re-establishing a universal monarchy.39 This is beautifully
illustrated by a Titian painting dating from the early 1570s (the Dutch revolt
was well underway, but a Spanish-led Christian fleet had just triumphed
over the Turks at the battle of Lepanto) now in the Prado in Madrid: here
37
Quoted in David Loades, England’s Maritime Empire: Seapower, Commerce and
Policy, 1490-–690 (Harlow: Longman 2000), 86.
38
Geoffrey Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1998).
39
Ibid.; see also Hernando Sánchez, ‘Non sufficit orbis?’, 29–77.
 12 Beatrice Heuser
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Figure 4. Titian, Religion Saved by Spain, 1572–75 (Madrid: Prado).

Source: © Madrid, Museo Nacional del Prado.

ecclesia, naked and vulnerable, looking much like the repentant Magdalene,
is threatened by the Turk (riding a sea horse and followed by a fleet), and by
the snakes surrounding the rotten tree trunk of heresy. Enter Spain,
Minerva-like, triumphant, followed by Justice, to bring ecclesia armour,
shield, weapons, and an army of saints as reinforcement (Figure 4)40
There was even a Spanish initiative dating from 1596 to create a
religious order (in the tradition of the crusading orders) to operate at
sea, with a navy of 21 galleons, against the infidel and against
heretics.41 The choice of galleons – ships relying entirely on wind
40
On the interpretation of the painting, see Hernando Sánchez, ‘Non sufficit orbis?’,
50f.
41
Augustín Jiménez Moreno, ‘Las Órdenes Militares y la defensa de la Monarquía
hispánica. Un proyecto de organización naval atlántica: el memorial de Ramón
Ezquerra (1596)’, in García Hernán and Maffi (eds), Guerra y Sociedad en la
Monarquía Hispánica, Vol. 2, 700–05.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 13

power – is an indicator that this fleet was to be used mainly in the open
waters of the Atlantic – i.e. against Protestant England and the Dutch
rebels – rather than in the Mediterranean where oar-propelled galleys
and galleasses were still predominant.42
Parker doubts that Philip himself espoused the goal of a universal
monarchy, but, crucially, contemporaries were convinced that he did,
and felt threatened by it much as in the twentieth century the liberal
democracies would feel existentially threatened by the expansionist,
universalist ambitions of ‘world Communism’. Philip’s grand strategy
was perceived by Queen Elizabeth’s government as being, ‘by the means
only of his Indies; not purposely to burn a town in France or England,
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but to conquer all France, all England, and Ireland’, as even the
prudent, war-weary Lord High Treasurer of Her Majesty, William
Cecil, Lord Burghley, told Parliament in 1592. Or, as his opponent and
head of the war faction, Robert Devereux, the Second Earl of Essex,
told her Council in 1598, it was to ‘establish . . . a Spanish universal
monarchy’.43
Either way, as it was Philip’s unquestionable aim to reassert his
authority over the Netherlands, against the Dutch uprising, he needed
to continue with his counterinsurgency campaign there. By 1585
England and Spain found themselves supporting opposite sides in the
religious civil war in France and the insurgency of the Protestants
against Spanish rule in the Netherlands. The Dutch fielded increasingly
professional armed forces, from 1585 with the open support of
Elizabeth’s England and, periodically, of France under Henri III and
Henri IV. Spain’s lines of communication lay either overland on the
camino español (the preferred route from 1568 to 1638, through
Habsburg possessions from Milan through the Franche Comté to the
Low Countries), or by sea (along the coast of France through the
Channel to the Dutch ports). Two of these – Brill (Brielle) and Flushing
(Vlissingen) – were controlled by England, on the basis of the 1585
Treaty of Nonsuch concluded with the Dutch rebels.44 The Spanish sea
route could thus be challenged by France and England.

42
Other religious orders – such s the Knights of St John at Malta – owned navies, but
their mission was to fend off the Turks and Barbary pirates.
43
John Strype, Annals of the Reformation, Vol. 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1824),
151; Reasons Pro and Con Being a Debate at the Council Table between the Treasurer
and the General for Making Peace or Carrying on the War in the Reign of Queen
Elizabeth, wherein the Force of the General’s Argument Prevailed against the Sophistry
of the Treasurer’s (London: S. Popping, 1712), 8.
44
Geoffrey Parker, The Army of Flanders and the Spanish road, 1567–1659: The
Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (London:
Cambridge University Press, 1972).
 14 Beatrice Heuser

In 1585, Anglo-Spanish hostilities, which amounted to a never

formally declared war, turned into direct military clashes in the
Netherlands. These took place against the background of propaganda
warfare but also Spanish-backed attempts to effect a regime change in
England, including several attempts to assassinate Queen Elizabeth.
Pope Pius V had made Elizabeth fair game for any regicides with his
bull Regnans in excelsis of 1570, upheld by his successors, that declared
her a heretic. Elizabeth thus had much reason to fear the Iberian dual
monarchy, and in particular a Spanish invasion of her realm.
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Spain’s Strategic Options

What, at this point, were Spain’s strategic options? While France’s
religious wars were closely linked with the Dutch insurgency, between
1570 and 1625 France had not much of a navy. Nevertheless, in the
sixteenth century the Habsburgs in general and the Spanish Habsburgs
in particular rose to be the French kings’ rivals for power in Europe
and, later, large parts of the world. Until the Spanish War of
Succession, Spain’s wars were dominated mainly by the confrontation
with France, a bloody sparring that was only concluded when Henri
IV’s descendant, King Louis XIV, managed to put one of his grandsons
on the Spanish throne. Spain proved unable to defeat France (which
would have required a massive confrontation of land armies either in
France’s north or along the Pyrenees or both); nor did Philip II have
hopes of doing so. The Franco-Spanish confrontation – which overlay
the European civil war of Catholics against Protestants – was tempora-
rily suspended when Henri IV converted to Catholicism to gain
acceptance within France (bringing inter-denominational reconcilia-
tion). Yet the Franco-Spanish rivalry would burst into flame again in
the following century.45
England was another matter: Philip’s resources – local taxation in his
united kingdoms covering the Iberian Peninsula but also revenue from
his overseas empire – were several times larger than those of
Elizabethan England. And yet Philip’s wars brought him huge debts.
There were thus limits, not merely financial but also physical, to what
he could do to harm England,46 as became clear during the Anglo-
Spanish War.
As England could threaten Philip’s maritime line of communication
with his Dutch possessions, one protective measure Philip could resort
to was to gain a foothold in Brittany and to seize Calais (from which, in
45
N.M. Sutherland, ‘The Origins of the Thirty Years’ War and the Structure of
European Politics’, English Historical Review 107/424 (1992), 587–625.
46
Parker, The Grand Strategy of Philip II.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 15

turn, the forces of Henri IV, with English help, ousted Philip twice). If
England did not fall into his lap through an internal coup d’état, a
further option was to invade and take possession of England, a strategy
he attempted unsuccessfully in 1588, with a little success in 1595 (the
Spanish fleet succeeded in burning Penzance, Mousehole, and Newlyn
in Cornwall), and unsuccessfully in both 1596 and 1597. On the first
occasion, his navy was defeated by the navy rustled up by England.
A fourth option open to Philip (not exclusive of the previous three),
which he also tried out, was to do unto the English as they were doing
unto him: to support a rebellion in their backyard, Ireland. Until 1574,
Spanish ships could freely approach the Irish coasts, as in 1553, the first
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year of Mary I’s reign, Philip had acquired the right for his subjects to
fish in that region for a period of 21 years.47 Thereafter, Spanish
relations with the Irish remained close, and indeed elites of the two
nations were united in their antipathy to English Protestantism.
Spaniards and Irishmen were among the soldiers who were supposed to
invade England in Philip’s campaigns of 1585–97, and in 1600 a Spaniard,
Matthew de Oviedo, became archbishop of Dublin. Successive Irish
rebellions, but especially the rebellion (prepared from 1591, usually
dated 1594–1603) led by Hugh O’Neill of Tír Eoghain (Tyrone), also
known as the Nine Years’ War against England, received Spain’s indirect
and later direct support: first, Spanish advisers helped the Irish develop
increasingly successful guerrilla tactics; then Spanish regular troops were
sent to help them. Eventually, England had to send larger forces to Ireland
than it had been able to finance for its support of the Dutch Rebellion. The
Nine Years’ War was only brought to an end well after the battle of Kinsale
(1601), where Irish rebel and Spanish regular forces clashed with, and
were defeated by, an English army.48 Even after O’Neill had agreed to a
peace and to submission to Elizabeth in 1603, Irish resentment of English
overlordship smouldered on and would become a major factor again in the
War of the Three Kingdoms (1639–51).
Both monarchs under whom the Anglo-Spanish War had started
were dead and buried before peace was concluded under their
respective successors, Philip III and James I and VI. (The Dutch
Rebellion, however, was not over, and would only end with the
independence of the United Provinces at the end of the Thirty Years’
War, into which the rebellion merged.)

47
Boroughs, The Soveraignty, p.80.
48
Enrique García Hernan, Ireland and Spain in the Reign of Philip II (Dublin: Four
Courts Press, 2009). These relations did not prevent the notorious massacres by the
Irish of survivors of the 1588 Armada who were shipwrecked on Irish beaches on their
way back to Spain.
 16 Beatrice Heuser

The Late Sixteenth-Century Strategic Options for England

What were the strategic options for England in the war with Spain?
Brick-and-mortar defences along the coast already existed in the form
of castles, including recent additions under Henry VIII, such as
Southsea Castle near Portsmouth. Elizabeth did not build any more.
An arguably cheaper defensive option was to shield England with a
standing fleet closely hugging her coasts, as proposed by John
Mountgomerie in 1570, which would have required 40 ships49 –
about twice what the English Navy Royal owned at the time.50 No
attempt was made under Elizabeth to reach such numbers. Instead, in
case of need, privately owned vessels would be added to the Navy
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Royal ad hoc in a joint venture, with any resulting spoils to be shared –

hence the claim that piracy was a state-run enterprise in Elizabethan
times.51
We have already described the symmetric indirect options followed
by both Spain and England of supporting rebellions against the other
power. In 1585, England also needed to make available forces to police
Ireland, where a rebellion by the Fitzgeralds of Desmond (Munster) had
only recently been quelled. At least, in the absence of any Irish navy or
of a Spanish base in Ireland, English lines of communication across the
Irish Sea were not threatened. From 1594, crushing the subsequent Irish
rebellion became England’s priority second only to the direct defence of
the English coast against a Spanish invasion. In turn, to support the
Dutch against the Spanish, and having lost Calais in 1555, England
needed secure access to one or more new ports on the opposite coast to
facilitate troop transport and supplies, hence the temporary English
stewardship of Flushing and Brill. As in previous centuries since the
Norman Conquest, the command of the Channel continued to be of
great importance for England.
Naval battle was a further strategy that England could – in principle
– impose on the enemy, arguably preventively or pre-emptively, in his
home waters. In that case England would have had the burden of
keeping up long lines of communication, vulnerable to adverse winds.
But how to draw Spanish ships out of their ports? And, given a choice,

49
I am very grateful to Benjamin Redding for this reference to and his transcription of
BL Add MS 18035. See Benjamin Redding, ‘Divided by La Manche: Naval Enterprise
and Maritime Revolution in England and France, 1545–1642’, PhD dissertation,
University of Warwick, forthcoming.
50
For details, see N.A.M. Rodger, The Safeguard of the Sea: A Naval History of Britain,
660–1649 (London: Penguin, 2004), 478–80.
51
David Childs, Pirate Nation: Elizabeth I and Her Royal Sea Rovers (Barnsley:
Seaforth, 2014).
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 17

did England really want a naval battle with Spain, or could Spain be
weakened in ways more profitable and less destructive for England?
Imposing a ‘blockade’ – a term only coined in the following century –
might be an answer, although it was logistically equally difficult.
Blockade could also be used, not to destroy Spanish ships, but to
intercept Spain’s supplies of silver and gold from America. As ships
could not be found in the open seas any more easily than a needle in a
haystack, this could only be attempted in three areas: at source, i.e.
where the Spanish convoys assembled their treasure and set out on their
voyages from America (the ‘Indies’) to Spain; along the way, when the
‘treasure fleet’ had to stop at islands to re-provision itself with water
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and victuals (these islands being the Azores or the Canaries); or close to
the destination harbours, mainly Cádiz, Lisbon, and what the English
called ‘the Groyne’ (La Coruña).
Any navy engaged in a blockade, however, would soon run out of
provisions. Even the Spanish, when holding bases (temporarily in
Brittany and Normandy and) in the Netherlands, when trying to
blockade the English coast, to prevent the English from shipping troops
and supplies to Brill and Flushing ran low on supplies. How, then,
could this be an option for England?
One answer, suggested by the English monarchs’ long history of
Continental lordship, was to establish bases on the adversary’s shores
(which would be supplied from the hinterland or surrounding region),
and/or to support rival claimants to the throne – or at least one of
Philip’s thrones, namely that of Portugal, relying on local support to
rise up against him and end his rule. This option was advocated by
Antony Wingfield, Matthew Sutcliffe, and Essex, packaging it as ‘the
rule of the sea’, as we shall see.
An easier and less costly, albeit indecisive answer was to harass
Iberian shipping and to stage short attacks on Philip II’s territorial
possession, in short, what Essex disparagingly called the guerra di
corsar (and what would later generally be referred to as guerre de
course or ‘commerce raiding’). Sir Francis Drake’s enterprises and Sir
Walter Raleigh’s inclinations fall in this category.
All these options were tried, and all relied heavily on the navy. The
majority relied on both navy and an army (what Julian Corbett
would later call ‘maritime’ joint operations). And one option in
particular would be urged upon the Queen as constituting
thalassocracy.

English Strategy in Practice

Already in the autumn of 1585, on the Queen’s orders, Drake sailed off
to the Caribbean, where he captured the Cape Verde islands belonging
 18 Beatrice Heuser

to Philip, and then attacked three other islands. He returned triumphant

to England the following summer. Arguably, he had succeeded in
disrupting Spanish trade at source, although the booty he brought
back scarcely paid for the entire expedition. One year later, he set off to
do the opposite: to strike at the Spanish end of Philip’s trade. Spain’s
most important harbour both for trade (mainly up the Guadalquivir to
Seville) and for men-of-war was Cádiz. In 1587 Drake destroyed
Spanish ships lying in its harbour, a campaign that was boisterously
referred to as ‘singeing the Spanish King’s beard’. It clearly annoyed
Philip no end, and indisputably contributed to his first attempt to
invade England in the autumn of 1588. On 30 March 1588, in a rare
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document illustrating Drake’s thinking – when rumours of the impend-

ing Spanish attack had already reached England – he strongly advo-
cated a preventive strike against Spain, rather than waiting for a
Spanish fleet to arrive in England’s home waters. He asked for as
many as 50 ships,

for two special causes: Firste, for that they are like, to strike the
firste blowe, and secondlie, it will putt greate and goode hartes,
into her Majesties loving subiects, bothe abroade and at home; For
that they wilbe perswaded in conscience, that the Lorde of all
strengthes, will putt into her Majestie, and her people, coraige, and
boldness, not to feare any invasyon in her owne Countrie, but to
seeke Gods enemyes and her Majesties, where they maye be
founde: For the Lorde is one our side, whereby we maye assure
our selves, our nombers are greater than theirs.52

While the Queen’s Council did not follow Drake’s recommendation

in 1588, in the form of a joint enterprise, it became the basis for
England’s campaign against Philip in the following year: with a joint
force of soldiers and sailors,53 Drake and Sir John Norris set off for
Lisbon in the hope of fomenting an uprising and putting a Portuguese
pretender, Dom Antonio, on the throne. Already in 1582, backed by
Catharina de Medici, a small fleet of French and Florentines had
unsuccessfully tried to help him regain his lost crown. For a number

52
Harry Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998), 312–15.
53
Antonie Wingfield, ‘A True Discourse (as is thought) by Colonel Antonie Wingfield’,
in Richard Hakluyt (ed.), The Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques of
Discoveries of the English Nation, Vol. VI (1589), repr. as Vol. IV (London: J.M.
Dent and New York: E.P. Dutton, 1927), 306–54. gives 13,000; Wallace T.
MacCaffrey, Elizabeth I: War and Politics, 1588–1603 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 88, gives the figure of 23,000.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 19

of reasons the English campaign also failed epically. Most crucially, no

spontaneous uprising of the Portuguese, especially in and around
Lisbon, materialised. The English forces were underequipped and
underprovisioned. Indiscipline was widespread, especially after they
discovered stocks of Portuguese wines. In short, this was an army that
tried – and failed – to fight on a massive hangover.54 Nor was the
secondary campaign aim of intercepting the Spanish treasure fleet at the
Azores (through a ‘distant blockade’) achieved.
In the following years, Philip was sufficiently diverted by his own
campaigning in northern France and the Low Countries not to attempt
any direct move against England. Elizabeth could thus follow the option
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of supporting allies on the Continent: English soldiers fought against

the Spanish in Normandy alongside the troops of Henri IV, and in the
Netherlands alongside the Dutch. It was probably in this period that ‘A
project how to make war upon Spain, written in the Queen’s time’ was
presented to her chief minister, proposing the following:

First, and principally, we must keep employed two main fleets upon
the coast of Spain eight months in the year, that is from March to
November. Every fleet to consist of forty five ships to be divided into
three squadrons; one to lie off the Rock [Cape Roca] to intercept all
traders of Lisbon; the second at the South Cape [St Vincent], to stop
all intercourse to San Lucar and Cadiz, and to and from the Indies;
the third to the islands [Canaries], lest they should there stop and put
their goods ashore, having intelligence of our being upon the coast of
Spain . . . Perhaps the number of these ships will exceed the propor-
tion her majesty is willing to employ. But if Holland will be drawn
from the trade of Spain and join with us the number may be easily
raised by them and our maritime towns in England, so that her
Majesty need but employ six ships of her own in each fleet, to serve
for the Admiral and Vice-Admiral of every squadron.55

This option also was apparently dismissed as too costly, but the need
for alternative measures was apparent.
In 1595, the English helped Henri IV of France take back Calais
temporarily from the Spanish, but, as we have seen, the Spanish in turn
attacked Cornwall. In the ensuing winter (1595/96), Drake, together
with his cousin Sir John Hawkins, one of England’s most adventurous
naval entrepreneurs and earliest slavers, returned to the option of
disrupting Spanish trade and intercepting the flow of American bullion
at source. Their campaign took them to Panama and would have been
54
Wingfield, ‘A True Discourse (as Is Thought) by Colonel Antonie Wingfield’, 308f.
55
Loades, England’s Maritime Empire, 131.
 20 Beatrice Heuser

successful, both militarily and in terms of the treasure they seized, had
not both leaders, and many of their soldiers and sailors, died of a locally
contracted illness.56
The news of their death arrived in England at much the same time as the
news that Calais had been recaptured by the Spanish. The Earl of Essex
now assumed the leadership of the war party, but followed Drake’s option
of setting out to hit Philip’s main ports, while Henri was supposed to keep
Philip occupied in the north.57 Meanwhile, the English leadership pro-
claimed an embargo on all supplies to Philip’s forces emanating from third
parties.58 Essex had to share the command of this expedition with three
other men: the Lord High Admiral (Charles Lord Howard of Effingham,
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later created Earl of Nottingham) as supreme naval commander; Vice

Admiral Lord Thomas Howard; and Sir Walter Raleigh. Collectively, they
saw it as their mission to rein in the ambitious Essex, the youngest of the
four, who commanded the soldiers on this expedition. Essex’s, and
originally also the Lord High Admiral Howard’s,59 plan had been not
just to singe Philip’s beard: it was to seize – and hold – the main ports of the
Iberian Peninsula: Cádiz, also Lisbon (in a further attempt to install Dom
Antonio, who had been pestering him about this), and possibly a third port
further north. But after the successful capture of Cádiz and much booty,
Essex’s fellow commanders overruled his plea to leave soldiers there (with
himself in command). This garrison would have had to be supplied from
the sea, and the option of doing so was negotiated with emissaries of the
King of Morocco, who offered his services.60 All the two Howards and
Raleigh wanted to do, however, was to return home with their booty as
quickly as possible.61
After another Spanish invasion attempt had been foiled by adverse winds
in the autumn of 1596, in the summer of 1597 Essex persuaded the Queen
to allow him to make a further – and, as it turned out, last – attempt to

56
James A. Williamson, Sir John Hawkins, the Time and the Man (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1927), 471–90.
57
Gustav Ungerer (ed.), A Spaniard in Elizabethan England: The Correspondez on
Antonio Pérez’s Exile, Vol. 1 (London: Thamesis Books, 1974), 303–16.
58
Erklärung auß was Ursachen die Durchleuchigste Mayestat in Engeland . . . ihr
Armada auff das Meer abgefertiget . . . (1596)
59
Essex later stated that it had been the Lord Admiral Howard’s plan initially; see
Walter B. Devereux (ed.), Lives and Letters of the Devereux, Earls of Essex, in the
Reigns of Elizabeth, James I, and Charles I, 1540–1646 (London: John Murray, 1853),
vol. 1, 351; see also R.B. Wernham, The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the
Elizabethan War against Spain, 1595–1603 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 55.
60
Stephen Usherwood and Elizabeth Usherwood, The Counter-Armada 1596: The
Journall of the Mary Rose (London: Bodley Head, 1983), 85, entry for 24 June 1596.
61
Julian S. Corbett, The Successors of Drake (London: Longman, Green, 1900),
89–133.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 21

attack the Iberian Peninsula from the sea, to forestall the sailing of another
Spanish armada while still at anchor at Ferrol. Again, the Queen insisted
that Essex share command, this time only with Raleigh and the younger
Howard. Raleigh wanted to repeat Drake’s Caribbean campaigns in order
to capture that year’s Spanish treasure fleet, while the Queen’s instructions
favoured Essex’s plan. And yet the expedition ended up in the Azores in
search of the Spanish merchantmen, whom they again failed to find. It was
lucky for England that the last Spanish attempt to invade England itself in
the autumn of 1597 was again frustrated by unfavourable winds.
In the Anglo-Spanish War, what is interesting is not merely that so
many different strategic options were identified and tested for the first
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time, but also that this set the pattern for many subsequent operations
in the following centuries which saw repeated (unsuccessful) English
attempts to conquer and hold Cádiz, to seize Spanish bullion fleets in
the West Indies, or around the Azores or the Canaries, to blockade
Spanish ports, or to destroy Spanish fleets in Spanish harbours.62

The Writers on Strategy

In the face of Philip’s ambitions, real or perceived, it is perhaps not
surprising that some Englishmen developed greater ambitions for their
monarch and their country, and introduced a revolution in English
claims to naval dominion. As we have seen, these ambitions drew partly
on earlier limited and quite reasonable claims of earlier English
monarchs to control the Channel, or the waters immediately around
England or at best the British Isles. Indeed, N.A.M. Rodger and Andrew
Lambert have shown that subsequent English naval ambitions probably
stemmed in large part from the very recognition of English weakness as
a land power.63 In 1511, King Henry VIII of England was urged by
unnamed counsellors to abandon ideas of reconquering the lost
territories in France, with the argument that

The natural situation of islands seems not to consort with conquests

of that kind. England alone is just an empire. Or, when we would
enlarge ourselves, let it be that way we can, and to which it seems the
eternal Providence hath destined us, which is by the sea.64

62
For many such examples, see Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of British Naval
Mastery (Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 1983); N.A.M. Rodger: The Command of
the Ocean: A Naval History of Britain, 1649–1815 (London: Penguin, 2005).
63
Rodger, The Command of the Ocean; Lambert, ‘Sea Power’.
64
Rodger, Safeguard of the Sea, 176.
 22 Beatrice Heuser

In Elizabethan times, we see a full-blown strategy debate around the

options described above. Even before the Anglo-Spanish rivalry turned fully
violent, by a plan dated 12 August 1579, John Hawkins had begun to
propagate a scheme for fighting Spain in its West Indian colonies to intercept
its treasure fleet. He argued, ‘There is to be stricken with this company’ –
referring to the fleet which he tried to persuade Queen Elizabeth to make
available for such an expedition – ‘all the towns [sic] upon the coast of the
Indies, and there need not be suffered one ship, bark, frigate or galley to
survive untaken.’ His biographer noted that Hawkins had this idea long
before Drake, whose last expedition and death at sea he shared. In 1579, the
Queen denied Hawkins the means to put his plan into practice.65
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Nevertheless, the chase after the Spanish treasure fleet was at the centre of
his plans, which he once again pursued in 1587/88. Alternatively to doing so
in the West Indies at source, he had argued that a mix of larger and smaller
English ships might impose a distant blockade on the Spanish coast, there to
intercept the Spanish treasure fleet.66

Antony Wingfield
The next writer on the subject is named by Richard Hakluyt, a great
naval enthusiast, who published his ‘Discourse . . . [on] the voyage to
Spaine and Portugall, 1589’, as ‘Antonie Winkfield’. In the text itself,
we encounter a ‘Captain Antony Wingfield’, written about, puzzlingly
(given the presumed authorship) in the third person. An Ant[h]ony
Wingfield67 (c. 1552 to sometime after 1611) was attached to Trinity
College, Cambridge, and in the 1570s served as a Greek reader to
Queen Elizabeth. He took leave of absence several times from his
university post, first to go on diplomatic missions to Denmark and
probably France, and again in 158968 when identification with the
author in question would put him among the adventurers who
embarked on the Lisbon campaign of which he gave an account.69
65
‘A provision for the Indies fleet, drawn by Mr Hawkins, Admiralty’, 12 August 1579;
see Williamson, Sir John Hawkins, 397.
66
Ibid., 396–98.
67
There were at least two eponymous cousins, however, one who died in 1605 and was
the son and heir of a Sir Robert Wingfield. A second was a further eponymous cousin
(dates of birth and death unknown), son of Sir Antony Wingfield (before 1488, d.
1552); see William Hervy, ‘The Visitation of Suffolk 1561’, in Joan Corder (ed.), The
Publications of the Harleian Society, New Series, Vol. III (London: Harleian Society
1984), 213, 219f.
68
Edward A. Malone, ‘Wingfield, Anthony (b. c.1552, d.in or after 1611)’, Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), <http://
www.oxforddnb.com.idpproxy.reading.ac.uk/view/article/29734>.
69
Wingfield, ‘A True Discourse (as Is Thought) by Colonel Antonie Wingfield’, 306–54.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 23

Wingfield or Winkfield (if this was indeed the author) pondered

whether this unsuccessful campaign had been thoroughly misguided,
and whether sticking to the previous strategy of fighting the Spanish in
France and in the Netherlands would have been preferable.70
The author’s own view was that the Dutch option did not offer more
hope of success, in view of the ‘intollerable expenses it requireth’. He
argued for another invasion of the Iberian Peninsula instead, where
with 20,000 men one might take Lisbon after all or other coastal towns
or even go up the Guadalquivir to Seville, thus seizing cities that could
be pillaged to extract booty compensating for the expenses of the
undertaking. Wingfield seems to have thought in terms of hit-and-run
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missions. An English fleet sailing up and down the Spanish coast stood
chances of intercepting the Spanish treasure fleet (Wingfield thought
mainly in terms of spoils), could starve Lisbon (the enemy’s ‘principal
citie’) into surrender, and deal some blows to the Spanish navy, even if
it did not lead to a decisive battle that would ‘damnifie’ the Spanish,
and even if England did not manage to secure a base to hold on the
Iberian mainland. Meanwhile, such attacks, he argued, would force
Philip to pull at least some of his soldiers out of the Netherlands to
defend his Iberian coasts, making it more likely that he could be
defeated in the north. He thought that the constant terror that an
English fleet might thus inspire in Portugal and Spain would suffice to
weaken the Spanish significantly. This is almost a dynamic early version
of the (admittedly more passive) ‘fleet in being’ argument that would be
fully developed only at the end of the seventeenth century.71
Interestingly, Wingfield’s account suggests that there were two
factions, one that he accused of the ‘idolatry of neptune’ which
pleaded for naval operations only, and another that Corbett might
later have called the ‘maritime joint operations faction’, as its members
saw the navy as an instrument to take armies to the enemy’s land to
operate there. Wingfield lamented the poor preparation of such joint
campaigns, and thought that Lisbon might easily have been captured
in 1589 had more emphasis been put on the army’s part in the
operation.72 Despite all shortcomings, he argued, that campaign had
taken less than two months, remarkably fast by any standards; ‘in this
short time of our Adventure’, after all,

we have won a towne by escalade, battred & assaulted another,

overthrowen a mightie princes power in the field, landed our armie
in 3 several places of his kingdom, marched 7 dayes in the heart of

70
Ibid., 517–26.
71
See Heuser, Evolution of Strategy, 212f, 231.
72
Wingfield, ‘A True Discourse’, 313f, 352.
 24 Beatrice Heuser

his country, lien three nights in the suburbs of his principall citie
[!], beaten his forces into the gates thereof, and possessed two of
his frontier Forts.73

Sir Walter Raleigh retrospectively claimed to have advocated a more

forceful and committed invasion of Spain at the time rather than doing
‘everything by halves’, of which he accused Queen Elizabeth.74 (In reality,
as we shall see, he was a member of the naval faction who opposed joint
operations with an element of land warfare. Thus, for example, in 1596
Ralegh would oppose Essex’s strategy to seize and hold Cádiz.)
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Matthew Sutcliffe
Trinity College, Cambridge and the reading of Thucydides may also be the
element connecting Wingfield with our next strategist, Matthew Sutcliffe,
whose time at Trinity overlapped with that of Wingfield, but also of
Anthony and Francis Bacon, and the young Earl of Essex. Essex’s stepfather,
the Earl of Leicester, was then the Queen’s supreme army commander and
as such compiled a war manual containing ordinances, rules of behaviour
for the armed forces.75 Essex seems to have felt the need to update these, but
not to have had the time or inclination to do so himself. He commissioned
Sutcliffe, who may well have been his tutor at Trinity, had then accom-
panied him and the Earl of Leicester to the Dutch wars, and was now the
Dean of Exeter Cathedral, to write such a book. Sutcliffe seized the occasion
to produce a book that is probably the most comprehensive strategic
concept written before the twentieth century, covering everything from
recruitment and financing of wars to grand strategy.76
Sutcliffe derived his strategic prescriptions for the war with Spain from
first principles. He explained, for example, ‘that it is farre better for the
English nation, things standing as now they do, to inuade the Spaniard, or
any other enemy in his owne country, than to receiue their assault, and
inuasion here at home, or to stay untill we do see the enemy on our owne
coast’. He dismissed the argument that the English should, out of a peaceful
and defensive inclination, await another Spanish attack at home, where the
English would have favourable conditions: ‘men, munitions, and victuals
73
Ibid., 471
74
Quoted in Corbett, The Successors of Drake, 1.
75
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, Lawes and Ordinances [for the English forces in the
Low Countries] (London: Christopher Barker, 1586).
76
See Beatrice Heuser, ‘A National Security Strategy for England: Matthew Sutcliffe, the
Earl of Essex, and the Cadiz Expedition of 1596‘, in Óscar Recio Morales (ed.), Redes y
espacios de poder de la comunidad irlandesa en España y la América española,
1600–1825 (Valencia: Albatros Ediciones, 2012), 117–35.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 25

sufficient; our wives, children, & country in our sight, safe places to retrait
unto’. Instead he argued in favour of pre-emption, because ‘He that first
chargeth his enemie, hath many aduantages’ as long as he is well provisioned
and equipped with men and materiel. If the Spanish were to invade England,
the English would not know ‘where the enemie will land, all the coast must
be furnished with souldiers’. This would require more men than an invasion
of Spain, and it would be a great financial burden to keep them provisioned
during all this time of waiting and uncertainty, and they would be removed
from the workforce, as they could not otherwise be assembled in time given
the likely late intelligence of where the Spanish would choose to land.
Moreover, English towns were no longer well enough walled to be able to
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fend off an invading force once it set foot on English soil.77

Therefore, in a passage echoing Thucydides, Sutcliffe extolled the
importance of the navy, ‘and diuers pointes to be considered of those
that command at sea’:

Those Nations and Cities, that haue the commaundement of the sea,
howsoeuer they are foiled at land: yet can neuer be thoroughly
vanquished, before they be beaten from ye Sea . . . Contrariwise howe
strong soeuer a Nation is by land, yet cannot the same mainteine itself
long, nor continue in reputation without sufficient power at Sea . . .
The use of ye nauy is great in peace, greater in warres. Thereby
traffic, & entercourse betwixt friends is maintained: victuals [that]
goe to the enemies are stopped; our wants of victuals, armes,
munitions, & other necessaries are supplied: the enemies coast is
spoiled, our owne defended: the coast townes of the enemiess
country, that liue upon the sea are brought to great extremities, our
own mainteined. Without ye same neither can the trade of merchan-
dize be mainteined, nor ye sea townes of ye enemie be besieged, nor
their country spoyled, nor can we understand ye enemies proceedings,
nor helpe, or wel defend our friends, or our selves.78

Here we have a full-fledged articulation of generalised strategic

reasoning, not merely suggestions of how to act in a particular
situation.

The Earl of Essex

In the same spirit, the Earl of Essex in the 1590s tried to coax Queen
Elizabeth into supporting his ambitious schemes for beating Europe’s
77
Matthew Sutcliffe, The Practice, Proceedings and Lawes of Armes (London: Deputies
of C. Barker, 1593), 96f, 100.
78
Ibid., 273–75.
 26 Beatrice Heuser

dominating power, Spain, through the use of sea power. He drafted a

letter on the way back from Cádiz in 1596, to be the first to get in his
version of why this campaign had failed to live up to his own and, in all
probability, the Queen’s expectations and to prepare the ground for a
follow-on campaign. He explained his position: ‘Th’experience of tymes
past’, Spain’s attempts at invasions, conspiracies against the Queen’s
person, subversion etc. made it impossible to sit still and wait for Spain
to launch its next armada.79 He saw the war between Spain and
England as no ordinary quarrel to restore possessions unrightfully
seized by an opponent, or to avenge particular injuries, which a
mediator might settle. Instead, he wrote to his Queen,
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you two are like 2 mightie Champions entred into the lists to fight
for the two great general quarrels of Christendome, Religion and
Libertie, hee forcing all to worship the beast, your Majesty standing
for God and his truth, Hee affirming to an vniuersall Monarchy,
your Majesty releeuing all the oppressed, and shewing that you are
powerfull enough to make him feede within his tether.80

Peace was thus not an option, especially not as Philip sought to

replace Elizabeth with his daughter. Therefore, Essex pleaded for ‘An
offensive war at sea’ which would be, to Philip, ‘more annoyance
because we shall not only impeach and interrupt his trafique with all
other countryes of Christendom whereby we shall impoverish his
merchants butt stop and divert his golden Indian streames whereby
we shall cut his life vaynes and let out the vital spirites of his estate’.81
This was to be achieved by seizing and permanently occupying Philip’s
main ports – Cádiz, Lisbon, and if possible also Ferrol and the Groyne.
This in turn would make Elizabeth ‘an absolute Queene of the
Ocean’.82
Essex, in explaining his strategy to seize and hold the key ports of
Spain in 1596, used the argument that only thus ‘our souverayn shallbe
trewly Regina maris and the trafike of th’Indyes and all things els that
belong to one that commands the seas will be certainly, and only,
her’s’.83 The alternative, the strategy to seek to intercept the Spanish
treasure fleet each time without a fixed territorial base to operate from

79
The ‘Hulton MS’, formerly BL Loan 23(1), now Add.MSS 74286, Microfilm 2275,
Fol. 157v–158r.
80
Copy of a letter by Essex, written aboard the Dewrepulse [sic], 12 Aug [1596], BL
Microfilm 2275, Fol. 149–52.
81
Hulton MS, Fol. 163v.
82
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, An Apologie of the Earle of Essex (1600), B1v.
83
Hulton MS, fol. 167v.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 27

(his fellow commander Sir Walter Raleigh’s preference not only on the
1596 and 1597 campaigns, but throughout his freebooter career), was
really ‘fitter enterprise for some decayd private man then for a state, for
yt savors of guerra di corsar’.84 Here, again, we find a strategy
proposed and defended on the basis of general principles, turning on
a more extensive notion than ever entertained before of what it meant
to rule the ocean. It was presented as a distinct strategic option, the
alternative to the guerra di corsar, or commerce raiding,85 then so
popular among English naval enterprisers.

Dr John Dee
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A further proponent of a bid for English thalassocracy was the

colourful Dr John Dee (1527–1608/09), who had taught at universities
from Cambridge to Prague as a Greek scholar, a mathematician
specialising in navigation, and also as an astrologist, and alchemist,
and who found himself towards the end of the century an adviser to
Queen Elizabeth.86 As the first fellow to teach Greek at the newly
established Trinity College, Cambridge (1546–48), Dee would have
read his Thucydides in the original Greek, of course.
Dee picked up on an interest in overseas colonisation which had been
growing among seafarers. Already in 1584, Richard Hakluyt had
written a proposal for the Queen to lay claim to ‘all the west Indies,
or at leaste to as moche as is from floride to the Circle articke’, and then
to initiate the ‘spedie plantinge in divers fitt places’.87 Such ideas were
thus circulating already.
On 8 September 1597, Dr John Dee wrote a letter to a friend
inscribed ‘Thalattokratiá Brettanikē’ (Dee’s transcription of
‘Θαλασσοκρατία Βριταννική’, the British rule of the sea). In it Dee
argued that the seas all around England, up to the very coast of Picardy,
Normandy, and Brittany, should be under the Queen’s ‘sea-jurisdiction
and sovereignty absolute’; the Queen should have jurisdiction also of
the seas to the west of England and Ireland, and indeed Scotland (as
that country had supposedly in olden times been tributary to the English
84
Hulton MS, fol. 165r.
85
Or guerre de course, as it would be termed by later authors writing in English, with
the sneering implication that it was an un-English, lily-livered French thing to do, when
in fact it had been the preferred strategy in most sixteenth-century English naval
operations.
86
R. Julian Roberts, ‘Dee, John (1527–1609)’, Oxford Dictionary of National
Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), <http://www.oxforddnb.com.
idpproxy.reading.ac.uk/view/article/7418>.
87
Richard Hakluyt, Discourse of Western Planting (1584), <https://ebooks.adelaide.
edu.au/h/hakluyt/voyages/v13/planting/complete.html>.
 28 Beatrice Heuser

kings), all the way to ‘that famous and very ancient Platonicall or
Solonicall Atlantis’. Finally, the Queen should rule over the North Sea up
to the coasts of Norway and Denmark, or ‘at least to the mid-sea’, and
again ‘half seas over’ towards Denmark, Friesland, and Holland.88
Around this time, Dr Dee also proposed the creation of – what at the
times would have been an enormous – royal fleet of 60 ships, which he
oddly described as ‘Petty Navy Royal’ to protect the ‘British Impire’
(sic) – by which he meant mainly the region around the British Isles and
the trading routes.89 Such an expense was way beyond the means of the
English crown then, or even after the union of England and Scotland.
(The British navy could only reach such a figure in the mid seventeenth
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century under Oliver Cromwell’s Commonwealth.90)

The Queen’s Own Strategy

Elizabeth decided instead, openly at least, to defend the freedom of the
seas. Paradoxically, this, like Dr Dee’s scheme, opened the way for English
colonisation of North America. Elizabeth refused to accept Pope
Alexander VI’s bestowal of the non-European world upon Spain and
Portugal. Early on in her reign, Elizabeth quarrelled with King Sebastian of
Portugal about this, and subsequently allowed Drake a free hand in North
America. In 1580 when Ambassador Mendoza complained about Drake
and his adventures in the ‘Indian’ seas, Elizabeth told him that making part
of the oceans a national chasse gardée was contrary to the Law of Nations,
especially as she did not recognise any jurisdiction of the Bishop of Rome.
In her view, ‘the use of the sea and air is common to all; neither can any title
to the ocean belong to any people or private man, forasmuch as neither
nature nor regard of the public use permitteth any possession thereof.’91
Elizabeth thus, well before Grotius, opposed any claim to a mare clausum
and insisted that the seas were free for all.
This is also why she did not take up those of her advisors who tried to
blandish her into assuming the role of Regina Maris and laying claim to a
larger sovereignty of the seas than mere dominion of ‘our seas of England
and Ireland’.92 The result, however, was a complex overall strategy that
combined defensive elements with support for allies and provocative
attacks on Spanish shipping, Spanish colonies, and indeed Iberian ports,
while always conservative of scarce resources, crown income, and man-
power. Both eyewitnesses and historians have accused Queen Elizabeth of
88
Fulton, Sovereignty, 104.
89
Loades, England’s Maritime Empire, 111.
90
Rodgers, Command of the Ocean, 607.
91
Fulton, Sovereignty, 107f.
92
Ibid., 104.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 29

lacking a coherent plan to build an empire, to colonise new territories, or

even just to increase her sphere of power. Preoccupied with the confronta-
tion on the European Continent and Ireland, and loyal to her allies – the
Dutch and King Henri IV of France – Elizabeth did not fully espouse any
colonial projects, and the colony named after her (Virginia) was discon-
tinued in 1599, as an eyewitness claimed, because the Queen did not do
enough to support this enterprise.93 From a post-colonial twenty-first-
century perspective, this is less worthy of criticism than it seemed to Sir
Walter Raleigh, Dr John Dee, or Matthew Sutcliffe, all of whom invested
their private fortunes in colonial projects and felt let down by the Queen in
their pursuit of a mix of ‘Protestantism, patriotism, and plunder.’94
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Either way, we have seen that Elizabethan England produced a

revolutionary change in the thinking and arguing about the use of
navies and the oceans. This can well be described as a transition from
mere ambitions to ‘safeguard the sea’ around the British Isles from
invasion to active use of the seas – the ‘command of the ocean’ –
ultimately to oust rivals and to build a global empire.95

From Thalassocracy to Command of the Sea

How Britannia Came to Rule the Waves under the Stuarts and the
Hanoverians
We find the concept of ‘command of the sea’ employed and pondered
under James I and VI. Both Bacon brothers had in the 1590s worked for
the Earl of Essex. Sir Francis Bacon was later credited with the dictum
that ‘He that commands the sea is at great liberty and may take as much
and as little of the war as he will,’ but it is difficult to trace in his
writings.96 When he urged King Charles I in the 1620s to go to war
against Spain, all the arguments and strategic options he mustered were
nothing but a reiteration of those that had been proposed and in part
implemented in the Anglo-Spanish War.97 Sir Walter Raleigh, another
veteran of its campaigns, in his History of the World marvelled at the
strength of the Phoenicians, who were ‘absolute kings of the
93
Armitage, ‘The Elizabethan Idea of Empire’, 277.
94
N.A.M. Rodger, ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Myth of Sea-Power in English History’,
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th series, 14 (2004), 156.
95
As reflected in the titles of the two superb volumes on the subject by Rodger:
Safeguard of the Sea and Command of the Ocean.
96
Quoted in David H. Olivier, German Naval Strategy 1856–1888: Forerunners of
Tirpitz (London: Frank Cass, 2004), 38; see Coutau-Bégarie, ‘L’émergence d’une Pensée
navale’, 34.
97
Francis [Bacon] Lord Verulam Viscount St Alban, Considerations tovching a Warre
with Spaine (1629).
 30 Beatrice Heuser

Mediterranean Sea’, and their main city of Carthage, which was

‘invincible while it commanded the sea’, and how Rome wrested the
‘absolute masterie of the sea’ from it. 98 The saying is attributed to him
that ‘Whosoever commandeth the sea commandeth trade; whosoever
commandeth trade commands the riches of the world’, and thus the
world itself.99 (And yet in his own career, as we have seen, he contented
himself with commerce raiding.)
Thenceforth, strategic-theoretical reflections all but disappeared. On
the whole the term ‘command of the sea’ was now relegated to contexts
of legal claims and British attempts to assert authority over the waters
surrounding the British Isles. James I tried to uphold the ‘saluting of the
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flag’, repeatedly greatly offending neighbours (including well-wishers,

ambassadors, and ships from more remote lands), but did not manage
systematically to collect the fishery taxes on the Dutch which he
imposed in theory. As he stopped issuing letters of marque to English
privateers, he has been portrayed as falling behind the French and
Swedes in joint venture naval commerce raiding while these countries
continued to back their own privateers; ships from both countries also
tried to avoid saluting English ships if at all possible.100 From 1631 the
Stuart navy stepped up its insistence upon this ritual. Foreign ships were
even expected to pass English ships leeward only, to mark their
submission. If foreign ships did not ‘do their duty’, they would be
hailed by the English, then a shot might be fired across their bows, or
over the poop, then between the masts or at the flag. The insubordinate
captain’s vessel might be captured and towed into an English port.101
In 1609, Grotius published, anonymously, his Mare Liberum in
Leyden. This created a lasting framework of thinking about interna-
tional law and the seas, built on Grotius’s assertion that the ocean
‘cannot be reduced to a state of private property’.102 Grotius was
answered for Scotland and King James by William Welwod, a professor
of law at the University of St Andrews, with a short guide to the
customary laws of the sea, building on Scottish legal interpretations.
Welwod argued with his fourteenth-century Italian colleague Baldus de
Ubaldis that the sea, like land, can be divided up into property areas,
and that fishing rights should be restricted to citizens of the state
owning the waters. He thought only ‘that part of the maine Sea or great

98
Sir Walter Raleigh, Historye of the World (London: Walter Bvrre, 1614), 314, 360, 696.
99
Quoted in Olivier, German Naval Strategy, 38; see Coutau-Bégarie, ‘L’émergence
d’une Pensée navale’, 34.
100
Kennedy, Rise and Fall, 39.
101
Fulton. Sovereignty, 204f, 207f, 276.
102
Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli ac Pacis, trans. Louise R. Loomis (Roslyn, NY: Walter
J. Black, 1949), 80.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 31

Ocean, which is farre remoued from the iust and due bounds aboue
mentioned’ is liberrimum, utterly free.103
By 1633 the debate was by no means settled. Sir John Boroughs,
keeper of his Majesty’s Records in the Tower, claimed ‘[t]hat Princes
may have an exclusive property in the Soveraigntie of the severall parts
of the Sea, and in the passage, fishing & shores thereof, is so evidently
true by way of fact as no man that is not desperately impudent can deny
it’.104 Without such a law and ‘correcting and securing power in case of
wrong, or danger’ to enforce it, however, men would become ‘of the
like condition with the fishes that live [in the sea], of which the greater
doe usually devoure, and swallow the lesse’. 105 Tracing back ‘the
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Superiority of the Seas of England’ to times immemorial, ‘the

Soveraignty of our Seas’ should be considered

the most precious Jewell of his Majesties Crown, and (next under
God) the principall meanes of our Wealth and Safetie, all true
English hearts and hands are bound by all possible meanes and
diligence to preserve and maintaine the same, even with the
uttermost hazard of their lives, their goods, and fortunes.106

Next came the abovementioned John Selden, who argued for an

extension of the bounds of the maritime dominion of Britain up to

the very Shores or Ports of the Neighbor-Princes beyond-Sea, are

Bounds of the Sea-Territorie of the British Empire to the Southward
and Eastward; but that in the open and vast Ocean of the North and
West, they are to bee placed at the utmost extent of those most
spacious Seas, which are possest by the English, Scots, and Irish.107

With this, like Dr Dee before him, he claimed the Atlantic Ocean up
to the borders of North America.
Cromwell’s republican government maintained the Stuart insistence
that other navies, passing through the channel, must strike their flags to
British ships. Meanwhile, the Danes continued levying their Sound
Dues, and the outcome of the Thirty Years’ War led Christina, Queen

103
William Welvvod, An Abridgement of All Sea-Lawes; Gathered Forth of All
VVritings and Monuments, whih Are to Be Found among Any People or Nation,
vpon the Coasts of the Great Ocean and Mediterranean Sea (London: Humfrey Lownes
for Thomas Man, 1613), Title XXVII, 61–72.
104
Boroughs, The Soveraignty of the British Seas, 1f.
105
Ibid., 3.
106
Ibid., 6, 65–67, 164f; see also Fulton, Sovereignty, 365.
107
Selden, Of the Dominion, 459.
 32 Beatrice Heuser

of Sweden, to claim sovereignty over large parts of the Baltic, as the

Westphalian Peace Treaties had confirmed Swedish entitlement to lands
conquered that formed part of the Holy Roman Empire.108 Indeed, in
the seventeenth century, the kingdoms of Denmark–Norway and
Sweden competed for the sovereignty of the Baltic Sea.109 Nearer
home, the monarchs of England and Scotland found themselves once
again challenged by the French, who in a tit for tat tried to force the
English to strike their flags to French ships. Charles I stubbornly revived
the Plantagenet claim to the sovereignty of the entire Channel, in pace
Domini Regis, prohibiting the passage of foreign men-of-war.110
But the worst were the contests on this point of honour and sovereignty
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with the Dutch, and the succession of three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the
seventeenth century was initiated in 1652 by one such clash over this
formality.111 At the end of the Third Anglo-Dutch war in 1674, the Dutch
agreed with gritted teeth that they would salute the English flag, but as a
matter of courtesy and honour, rather than obligation. In the Peace Treaty
of Westminster they promised to honour the British ‘flag called the Jack, in
any of the seas from the Cape called Finisterre, to the middle point of the
land called van Staten, in Norway’ by striking their own flag and lowering
their topsail. The clause would be inserted also in subsequent Anglo-Dutch
treaties as late as 1784.112 By then many countries claimed domination
over the sea along their coastlines within cannon shot, or in the words of
Dutch lawyer Cornelius van Bynkershoek (1673–1763): ‘the lordship of
the land ends where the force of arms ends’; it became standard practice to
define it as three miles from shore, as, for example, Denmark and Sweden
would apply in the eighteenth century.113
Although fishery rights continued to be a bone of contention, as British
power grew, Britain could afford to become more conciliatory. When in
1740 Thomas Arne composed the music to James Thomson’s lyrics for
their opera on King Alfred, Britannia de facto ruled the waves well beyond
108
Konrad Müller (ed.), ‘Instrumentum Pacis Caesareo-Suecicum Osnabrugense’, in
Instrumenta Pacis Westphalicae: Die Westfälischen Friedensverträge 1648 (Bern:
Herbert Lang & Cie 1949), Article X.
109
Jan Glete, ‘Naval Power and Control of the Sea in the Baltic’, in John Hattendorf
and Richard Unger (eds.), War at Sea in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press 2003), 217.
110
Fulton, Sovereignty, 117, 263, 277
111
Roger Hainsworth and Christine Churches, The Anglo-Dutch Naval Wars
1652–1674 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 3
112
Fulton, Sovereignty, 508f.; H.S.K. Kent: ‘The Historical Origins of the Three-Mile
Limit’, American Journal of International Law 48/4 (1954), 537–53.
113
Fulton, Sovereignty, 21. See Cornelius Bynkershoek, De Dominio Maris Dissertatio
(1703), ed. Ralph van Deman Magofin, James Brown Scott, and Herbert F. Wright
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1923).
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 33

those surrounding the British Isles, although this was still periodically
challenged (by then mainly by the French). Fulton records that the clause
insisting on the saluting of British ships was ‘quietly dropped out of the
admiralty instructions’ on their dealings with other nations’ ships after the
British victory at Trafalgar in 1805.114 In the meantime, insistence on the
practice had become something of a burden for Britain anyway, as
Nicholas Rodger observes, adding shrewdly that after 1805 ‘There was
no more need of it, now that Britain had incontestably gained the real
command of the ocean.’115 Only the practice of dipping – i.e. saluting,
rather than completely striking (the symbol of surrender) – one’s ensign
(state flag) by merchant shipping when encountering any navy vessel the
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world over remains by courtesy; it is customary for the naval vessel to

respond by dipping its ensign in return.116

Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Writing on Naval (Maritime)

Warfare
From the mid-seventeenth century, writing on naval matters reverted to a
concentration on technical and at best tactical matters, and, curiously, as
Britannia was ascending as a European and a colonial power, the British
for two centuries seem to have lost their interest in any theoretical
treatment of the subject which had any political dimension. In the
eighteenth century, Queen Elizabeth and Oliver Cromwell may have
been iconic figures for fans of the Royal Navy for having turned it into a
tool of national politics, but I have seen no reflections on their strategies.
Other European writers also seem to have turned away from
reflections on strategy. While they discussed the duties of naval officers,
the problems of victualing of ships, ‘The ordering of fleets in sailing,
chases, boardings and sea-fights’, orders of naval battle (now generally
conducted in linear formations), the construction of ships, and rigging
and manoeuvre, they showed no interest in the political ends of naval
warfare and thus had exclusively tactical concerns.117 We recall that
Grenier dismissed previous authors on naval warfare for their narrow
technical treatment of the subject matter. In the view of his contempor-
ary Audibert Ramatuelle, however, Grenier was guilty of the same.

114
Fulton, Sovereignty, 15.
115
Rodger, Command of the Ocean, 583.
116
See <http://www.seaflags.us/customs/customs.html#dip>.
117
Nathaniel Boteler, Six Dialogues about Sea-Services (London: William Fisher &
Richard Mount, 1688); Paul Hoste, L’art des armées navales, ou Traité des Evolutions
navales (Lyons: Anisson & Posuel, 1697); Paul Hoste, Théorie de la Construction des
Vaissaux (Lyons: Anisson & Posuel, 1697); Bigot de Morogues (Sébastien-François,
 34 Beatrice Heuser

Ramatuelle in turn barely touched on greater political contexts in which

navies might be used militarily.118
It was only in the late nineteenth century that political-strategic
dimensions once again entered writing on naval warfare. In Britain,
Vice Admiral Philip Howard Colomb lectured on the ‘command of the
sea’, elevating it to one of the main aims to be aspired to by naval
strategy.119 The term now experienced its second renaissance after that
of the sixteenth century: soon it was gushing out of the pens of authors
on both sides of the Atlantic.120
In America, writing on naval strategy became truly popular with the
works of Alfred Thayer Mahan, who sought his early inspiration in the
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English maritime campaigns especially of the late seventeenth, eight-

eenth, and early nineteenth centuries.121 His main competitor for the
honour of having defined modern strategic concepts as they are still
with us was Julian Stafford Corbett (1854–1922), who by an irony of
fate studied also at Trinity College, Cambridge. He became thoroughly
fascinated by the exploits and writings of Sir Francis Drake and his
successors.122
It is little wonder, then, that his great work of 1911, Some Principles
of Maritime Strategy, by which he meant ‘the principles which govern a
war in which the sea is a substantial factor’, should have been hugely

vicomte), Tactique navale, ou Traité des évolutions des signaux (Paris: H.-L. Guérin &
L.-F. de la Tour, 1763); John Clerk of Eldin, the Elder, An Essay on Naval Tactics,
Systematical and Historical (London: T. Cadell, 1790); Michel Depeyre, Tactique et
Stratégies navales de la France et du Royaume-Uni de 1690 à 1815 (Paris: Economica,
1998), 115–124, 195–205, 230–43; Bruno Colson and Jean-Pierre Colson, ‘Les
Penseurs navals hollandais’, in Hervé Coutau-Bégarie (ed.), L’Evolution de la Pensée
navale, Vol. 4 (Paris: Economica, 1994), 173–80.
118
Audibert Ramatuelle, Cours élémentaire de Tactique navale (Paris: Baudouin, 1802),
xii.
119
Philip Howard Colomb, Naval Warfare: Its Ruling Principles and Practice
Historically Treated (London: W.H. Allen, 1891), 25–70, 107–202.
120
Henry Spencer Wilkinson, Command of the Sea and Brain of the Navy (London:
Archibald Constable, 1894); Charles Edward Callwell, Military Operations and Maritime
Preponderance: Their Relations and Interdepenence (Edinburgh: Wm Blackwood, 1905;
Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1996), 1ff, 170; Sir Cyprian Arthur George Bridge,
Art of Naval Warfare (London: Smith, Elder, 1907), 123 ff; Sir Julian Corbett, Some
Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: US Naval Institute Press, 1988), 91–106;
121
See particularly Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
1660–1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1890); idem, Sea Power in Its Relations to the War
of 1812, 2 vols (Boston: Little, Brown, 1905).
122
Julian S. Corbett, For God and Gold (London: Macmillan, 1887); idem, Sir Francis
Drake (London: Macmillan, 1890); idem, Papers Relating to the Navy during the
Spanish War 1585–1587 (London: Macmillan, 1898); idem, Drake and the Tudor
Navy (London: Longman, 1898); idem, The Successors of Drake.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 35

influenced by the events and writings discussed above. He defined as

‘the object of naval warfare’, ‘directly or indirectly either to secure the
command of the sea or to prevent the enemy from securing it’.123 The
sea, Corbett argued, has the positive value of being a ‘means of
communication’, but also a ‘negative value’ of being a barrier.

By winning command of the sea we . . . [place] ourselves in

position to exert direct military pressure upon the national life
of our enemy ashore, while at the same time we solidify it
against him and prevent his exerting direct military pressure
upon ourselves.
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Command of the sea, therefore, means nothing but the control

of maritime communications, whether for commercial or mili-
tary purposes. The object of naval warfare is the control of
communications, and not, as inland warfare, the control of
territory. 124

When Mahan and Corbett wrote, commerce raiding or guerre de

course was no longer an acceptable form of warfare. The Paris
Declaration respecting Maritime Law of 1856 had outlawed privateer-
ing and increased protection for neutral shipping, ‘a radical reversal of
the centuries-old British . . . aggressive interpretation of the right to
search’.125 Economic warfare took new forms. Corbett therefore paid
attention only to ‘commerce prevention’ by means of blockade rather
than the enrichment of one’s own economy by seizing the enemy’s, so
important a factor in Elizabethan warfare. Corbett defended blockades
by arguing that wars have to be waged in such a way as to ‘exert
pressure on the citizens and their collective life’ so as to bring them to
an end.126 Corbett differentiated between several forms of blockade,
such as ‘close’ blockade – to keep the enemy ships in their port – and
‘open’ blockade – at a distance, more akin to economic blockade.127
Like Drake, Wingfield, Sutcliffe, and Essex, Corbett approved of the
idea of ‘seeking out’ the enemy because of, ‘firstly, the moral value of
seizing the initiative, and secondly, the importance of striking before the
enemy’s mobilization is complete’.128

123
Sir Julian S. Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy (Annapolis, MD: US
Naval Institute Press 1988), 91–106.
124
Ibid., 94.
125
Jan Martin Lemnitzer, Power, Law and the End of Privateering (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 8 and passim.
126
Corbett, Some Principles of Maritime Strategy, 97f.
127
Ibid., 183–85.
 36 Beatrice Heuser

Corbett dwelt also on how to secure command of the sea:

(1) Methods of securing command:

(a) By obtaining a decision.
(b) By blockade.
(2) Methods of disputing command:
(a) Principle of ‘the fleet in being.’
(b) Minor counter-attacks.
(3) Methods of exercising command:
(a) Defence against invasion.
(b) Attack and defence of commerce.
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(c) Attack, defence, and support of military expeditions.129

All of this, with the exception of the late seventeenth-century concept

of the ‘fleet in being’,130 would have made perfect sense to Sutcliffe,
Wingfield, Essex, Dee, and even the Spanish strategists in Philip II’s
entourage.

Epilogue
One can look at these striking similarities between Corbett’s concepts
and sixteenth-century English theory and practice of naval strategy in
two ways. One is to note that Corbett deliberately couched his
prescriptions for the early twentieth century in terms of conservative
continuity with a traditional English/British way of war in order to
counter arguments from the excessively technically minded.131
Corbett’s approach and conceptualisation of maritime warfare were
not unhelpfully backward-looking in themselves; in fact, there is general
agreement that his ideas have weathered the changes of the last hundred
years better than Mahan’s.
The other way of looking at the remarkable parallels between
arguments of English Renaissance naval thinkers and Corbett’s writings
is to doff one’s cap to the prescience and modernity of the arguments of
the former. Admittedly, in their own times, the technical limitations
with which they had to contend made it impossible for England to
defeat Spain in any of the ways proposed; all that Elizabeth’s naval and
military commanders achieved – against a much stronger adversary –
was a defensive standoff. Yet one must admire the early authors
128
Ibid., 174.
129
Ibid., 165f.
130
Ibid., 220f
131
I am grateful to Professor Andrew Lambert for drawing my attention to this
possibility.
 Regina Maris and the Command of the Sea 37

discussed above for their innovative thinking, which they boldly

attempted to put into practice at the risk of their lives, and the succinct
and clear way they put their case and formulated their options –
something strategists today would do well to imitate.
Several questions for further research arise from this. One is what
concepts Portuguese and Italian writers of the late sixteenth century
brought to naval and maritime strategy. Another is why, at first
viewing, the published literature on naval warfare that was written in
the following century seems so lacking in strategic reflection, when,
clearly, naval warfare became ever more important and in the histories
of some countries, notably Britain, the Netherlands, Spain, and France,
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took centre stage. In any case, as we have seen, it is clearly not true that
there was an ‘almost complete void’ in writing about strategy before the
French Revolution. And one suspects that many such treasures yet
remain to be dug up in historical archives.

Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Professors N.A.M. Rodger, Enrique García Hernan,
Andrew Lambert, and John Hattendorf as well as Dr Michele Margetts,
Dr David Reindorp, and Benjamin Redding for their invaluable
guidance on this subject. All remaining mistakes are entirely my own.
Thanks are due also to Dr Rosemary Gill who gave me very helpful
advice on drafting.

Notes on contributor
Beatrice Heuser occupies the chair of International Relations at the
University of Reading. She studied History at the University of London
(Bedford College, London School of Economics) and International
Relations at Oxford University (St Antony’s and St John’s Colleges).
She obtained her Habilitation in Modern History from the Philips
University of Marburg. She has taught at King’s College London
(Department of War Studies, 1991–2003), and for shorter periods at
the Universities of Reims, Potsdam, Paris IV and Paris VIII, at the Ecole
de Journalisme at Lille and the University of the Bundeswehr in
Munich. She was Director of Research at the Military History
Research Office of the Bundeswehr (2003–2007).

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