2nd Spanish Armada 1596. Spain and England had been at war for nearly twelve years with neither side gaining the upper hand. The result of the intervention of Philip II in the religious war in France in support of the Catholic League, meant that Spanish forces had established coastal garrisons along the French and Flemish coast by the late 1580s. These bases had a huge strategic value because they allowed England to be threatened by the Spanish fleet and troops. England on the other hand had also intervened in France, but in support of King Henry IV of France, as a result of
Spanish Armada formation, not far from Dunkirk, where Parma's army, reduced by disease to 16,000, was expected to be waiting, ready to join the fleet in barges sent from ports along the Flemish coast. Communication had proven to be far more difficult than anticipated, and it only now became known that this army had yet to be equipped with sufficient transport or assembled in the port, a process which would take at least six days, while Medina Sidonia waited at anchor; and that Dunkirk was blockaded by a Dutch fleet of thirty flyboats under Lieutenant-Admiral Justinus of Nassau. Parma wanted the Armada