On the 20th may 1588 the armada left Portugal to go and invade England. The first reason Philip II (King of Spain) decided to invade England was because Elizabeth (Queen of England) got Sir Frances Drake to execute Mary and Philip and Mary were going to get married before this happened. The second reason was because Philip got mad at Elizabeth for not punishing Sir Francis Drake for robbing Philips ships. And the third reason was because Philip got annoyed the Elizabeth made England a protestant country again.
Philip planned to send a big army towards England but because he would’ve had to use 500 ships it would’ve cost too much money. So he got the Spanish army in the Netherlands to invade England. The armada had 130 ships, which had 10,000 sailors and 2,500 guns. On the other side, the English had filled 80 ships with fireballs towards Spain but because they were smaller they could move quicker. They only sent the ships to make the Spanish panic.
When the armada set sail, Philip decided to sail around Ireland. Along the way Philip lost over half of his ships because he didn’t have to correct map of Ireland. His map wasn’t the exact shape of Ireland. Most of his ships were wrecked because of the fire ships Elizabeth had sent towards him. The armada had cut their anchors so most ships only had one spare. The Spanish thought Ireland had looked like the map they had also they thought they could sail around the top and Ireland and about 10 miles after Donegal turn south, but if they had of done that they would of sailed to mayo or Sligo. Then if they had of sailed south west they would not have got back out to sea. The people who did make it ashore found themselves beaten, stripped, robbed or killed by the Irish.
The reason