The Armada succeeds

I can't think of this being done anywhere before...

A lot gets made of what if the Spanish armada had been succesful including a hell of a lot of rubbish.
So WI...The English armada is succesful.

Everything was against it from the start really so it would require a lot of messing around prior to it being launched but WI the theory all proves sound- England seizes the Azores, starts off a massed war of independance in Portugal, destroys the remains of the Spanish warfleet and captures the treasure fleet.


And yes, its succeed. Woops.
 
I can't see that England would have the troops to do anything serious in mainland Spain. The Portuguese wouldn't be much help and the Dutch couldn't help in Spain (and probably wouldn't if they could.)

On land, I suspect it would all be confined to looting a few towns and cities. I suspect the Spaniards would sue for peace in fairly short order, probably by bribing the British, although they may continue fighting the Dutch.

At sea, its quite another matter. First, the capture of the Treasure Fleet will place the Spanish in an awkward position. As memory serves, they had problems with paying their army in the Netherlands at the time.

In the long term, this brings about British naval ascendancy rather sooner than in OTL. For instance they may decide to concentrate on seizing the wealthy Spanish possessions in Central America, rather than try to subdue the barren wastes of North America.
 
The whole expedition was very ill planned, although they had managed to capture the Fleet coming from the Americas they could not have done anything else. The army was not prepared to take even a medium size town (as the failure in Coruña proves), they lacked cavalry and siege artillery. The Spanish galleons (that had survived the 1588 disaster were being repaired in Santander and the English fleet did not dare to come near them, in fact the English had only to face some galleys based in Lisbon that took shelter there and that fall over the Armada capturing some small vessels. In my oppinion it was impossible for the English Armada to be successful, almost ASBish, and in case they had managed to capture the Fleet with the silver, it would have been just that.
 
It's funny how some of the biggest English defeats are almost unknown: the 1589 Armada, Cartagena de Indias and that fifty vessels convoy that was routed and captured during the ARW in the Atlantic.
 
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