Spain, Rumor, and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Jacobean England: The Palatine Match, Cleves, and the Armada Scares of 1612-1613 and 1614 (Senning Calvin F.)(Paperback)

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-Jlich duchies in the lower Rhineland, into which Spanish forces intervened militarily, while England suspected the formation of a large Spanish-led Catholic league, seemingly bent on invasion, which caused a few days of panic in London. Both scares were based on misinformation and rumor, worsened by longstanding English anxiety over Spanish designs and doubts about the loyalty of English Catholics, the persecution of
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