On 21 July 1588, the English navy first engaged the Spanish Armada in battle off Devon. The very next day, as the Armada sailed east along the channel to rendezvous with the army of the Duke of Parma in the Spanish Netherlands and invade England, a tiny ship named the Wren left its home port of Sandwich, in Kent, carrying cloth bound for French Calais. On 23 July, the two fleets clashed again off Portland Bill in Dorset. The day after that, another small vessel, the Penny Pot, carried beer to Vlissingen in the Dutch province of Zeeland.
Queen Elizabeth I’s England is often presented as isolated from Europe by the Reformation and war. The story goes that the Tudor kingdom ‘went global’, projecting new maritime military and commercial power far beyond its shores and setting the stage for the British empire. Yet this simple formula ignores the lived experience of coastal communities where the so-called ‘Narrow Seas’, which divided Britain from Europe, drew narrowest. The shipmaster of the , Anthony Hickson, may have lacked the swagger of the queen’s ‘sea dogs’, like John Hawkins, Francis Drake or Walter
