The Spanish Armada

I finished Garrett Mattingly's The Armada, his 1959 acount of the 1588 Spanish naval attack on England. If I hadn't been already familiar with some of the people he mentions, I would have been somewhat confused, yet I still found it interesting, especially the collateral impact it had on France (which essentially experienced a coup against Henry III, the last of the Valois monarchs, and then a counter coup). In a sense, the attack never had a chance--and almost everyone seemed to know it. Its goal was to hook up with the Spanish army in what is now Belgium and help guard its transfer over to England (so that it could take control of London and get rid of the heretic Queen Elizabeth), but the Parma, the army commander there, hadn't really been seriously building ships or barges to convey his soldiers--and eventually, after a week of ongoing skirmishes all along the southern English coastline, the effective Spanish tactic of forming into a giant crescent to ward off all attacks collapsed off the coast of Belgium and several Spanish ships were destroyed. The remnants sailed around the British Isles. Mattingly claims that it was in essence the first modern naval encounter--and the commanders didn't quite yet know how to fight it. They were all religious fanatics and conniving plotters.