The course of English, and later British, history could have been changed on several occasions by fleets setting out from southern European countries if it hadn’t been for a number of weather events which have come to be known, collectively, as the ‘Protestant Wind’. Maggie Craig explains.
The Protestant Wind is the name given to the stormy weather which, over the centuries, seemed to favour the naval operations of Europe’s Protestant countries over the Catholic ones.
In 1588, Philip II of Spain launched an invasion fleet of some 130 ships against England. His aim was to depose Elizabeth I and return England to Catholicism.
The Spanish Armada was attacked by English ships off Plymouth and Calais. Their crews and the soldiers onboard fought back but a change in the wind blew them north. Between September and November 1588 at least 27 Armada ships foundered on the north and west coasts of Scotland and Ireland. Westerly winds contributed to driving them back against those coasts.
The Armada Portrait of Elizabeth I commemorates England’s delivery from the Spanish. Medals were also struck. One in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich depicts the ships of both fleets amid rough seas.
Its words come from the story of Moses and the Children of Israel escaping across the Red Sea: Flavit Jehovah et dissipati sunt. ‘God breathed and they were scattered.’ And so the myth of the Protestant Wind was born.
Like many Scots, I was brought up on the romantic tale that “there’s a Spanish galleon in Tobermory Bay!” As indeed there is. The remains of the San Juan de Sicilia sit on the sea bed off Tobermory on the island of Mull in the Inner Hebrides, deliberately blown up. The jury’s still out as to who lit the fuse.
The captain of El Gran Grifón ran his wind and wave battered ship aground on Fair Isle, between Orkney and Shetland. Surviving crew members were subsequently repatriated to Spain. An enduring legend has some staying in the Northern Isles and settling down there. Which is why Ann Cleeves gave her Fair Isle born detective in her Shetland series the name of Jimmy Perez.
In 1984 a delegation from Spain’s Orden del Mar Oceano visited Fair Isle to remember their compatriots of 400 years before and thank the islanders for their kindness towards them. Another story attributes Fair Isle Knitting to the Spanish sailors of El Gran Grifón. Or maybe the islanders themselves came up with the intricate and colourful patterns.
In 1688, William of Orange led 15,000 seaborne troops to England in the so-called Glorious Revolution. The Royal Navy initially remained loyal to William’s Catholic father-in-law (and uncle) James.
Standing by in the Thames Estuary, an easterly gale prevented them from sailing out to intercept William’s fleet as it sailed from the Netherlands for what was termed the ‘descent’ on England.
The idea of the Protestant Wind caught the public imagination. Diarist John Evelyn wrote that people eager to welcome a Protestant monarch were “praying incessantly for an Easterly Wind.“
Another contemporary observer, Edmund Bohun, wrote that for a good three weeks in October 1688, Londoners had one question on their lips every morning. “Which way is the wind blowing?” A sailor had been seen “to curse the Dragon in the Cheapside, for turning his Head where his Tail should be.”
The dragon, a symbol of the City of London, was the weather vane on top of the church of St Mary-le-Bow. When the wind did change, William sailed to Brixham in Devon. Without meeting much opposition, he proceeded to London to claim the throne, ruling as joint sovereign with his wife Mary.
In 1719, in the Little Rising, Spain came to the aid of the Jacobites. (Although the perception that they were overwhelmingly Catholic is a wrong but persistent one.)
A fleet was assembled in Cadiz. Rounding Cape Finisterre in Galicia, they hit a horrendous two-day storm. Ships were damaged and blown off course, men, horses and weapons lost.
Two frigates sailing from San Sebastian carrying 300 Spanish soldiers did make it to Scotland, although they too had to battle high winds before they got there. The short-lived ’19 ended in Jacobite defeat at the Battle of Glenshiel in the north-west Highlands.
But for the Protestant Wind, we might have known the last Jacobite Rising as the ’44 rather than the ’45. It’s the real historical event against which the action of my latest novel, Storm Tossed Moon, takes place. Early in 1744, Charles Edward Stuart left the Jacobite court-in-exile in Rome and travelled secretly across Europe. Maurice de Saxe, Marshall of France, was to lead a force of 10,000 men from Dunkirk in an invasion of England.
The plan was to land in Maldon in Essex, at the landward end of the estuary of the river Blackwater. From there they would march 40 miles to London, ready to fight — but also hoping for Jacobites in Essex and London, of whom there were allegedly many, to nail their colours to the mast.
As nominal head of the expedition, Charles gave it legitimacy. This was not a foreign power invading another country but the restoration of the rightful king of that country. In supporting a restoration of the Stuarts, France also sought to divert British attention and resources from the ongoing War of the Austrian Succession.
Word of this supposedly secret operation got out. When 22 French warships sailed along the Channel from Brest in Brittany, they found the Royal Navy waiting for them. At this point the wind blew up again, scattering British and French ships and badly damaging those waiting to set sail from Dunkirk. A second ferocious storm struck a few days later.
Although Charles remained optimistic, hoping for better weather ‘upon the change of the Moon’, the game was up. When he sailed for Scotland in the summer of 1745, he did so without French help.
A letter in the National Archives at Kew reports the storms of early 1744, telling of debris coming ashore from the scattered and battered ships. Local convents were full, survivors who had also made it ashore being cared for by the nuns. At least ten ships sank, some going down with all hands.
Footnotes to history and sacrifices to the Jacobite Cause and the Protestant Wind.
Storm Tossed Moon by Maggie Craig is published on 23 November, 2023.
A historian as well as a novelist, Maggie is the author of a number of books including Damn’ Rebel Bitches, Bare-Arsed Banditti and One Week In April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820. Her historical fiction includes the Storm over Scotland books; Storm Tossed Moon is the third in this series.
Other Historia features by Maggie include:
The Honours of Scotland
George IV’s visit to Edinburgh in 1822
The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820
The Battle of Killiecrankie
1719: the forgotten Jacobite rising
Damn’ Rebel Bitches: Research then and now
You may also be interested in these related features:
(Re)writing the Spanish Armada by JD Davies
Why the Glorious Revolution was… well, neither by Angus Donald
Raising the Jacobite standard: Glenfinnan, 1745 and
Five surprising facts about Charles Edward Stuart by Frances Owen
Images:
- Map of the track of the Armada around Britain and Ireland by Robert Adams and Augustine Ryther (detail), 1590: image no PBD8529(2), © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (CC BY-NC-SA 3.0)
- The ‘Armada Portrait’, c1588: © National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (CC BY-NC-ND)
- William III of Orange, 1702: Rijksmuseum via Picryl (public domain)
- The Battle of Glen Shiel by Peter Tillemans, 1719: National Galleries Scotland (CC by NC)
- Prince Charles Edward Stuart by Allan Ramsay, 1745: National Galleries Scotland (CC by NC)
