Spain, Rumor, and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Jacobean England

Geoffrey Parker has remarked that the Spanish Armada, though a disastrous defeat, was a considerable psychological success. Deep into the seventeenth century the specter of a returning armada haunted England. Twice in the middle of James I’s reign alarms occurred. One grew out of the king’s plan, opposed by Spain, to marry his daughter Elizabeth to the Calvinist elector of the Palatinate. The other derived from a rekindling of the disputed succession in the Cleves-Jülich duchies in the lower Rhi