Crusading Piracy? The Curious Case of the Spanish in the Channel, 1590–95

1590 was a year of portentous visions over the English Channel. Not only were reports circulating in London that mariners from the Low Countries had found the sea ‘the couler of blood’, but English sailors on her Majesty’s ship Vangard reported how: in an euening about setting time of the watch, all the men in the ship at the rising of the Moone, did discerne in the aire ouer the Moone the shape of a man, with a croun on his head and the king of Spaines armes plainly displaide, which continued visibly to bee seene for some small space, and soone after it was as a thing ouerthrown and vanished away, and seemed to them as though it were falling.1 These are only two examples of ‘sundry such sights’ that have ‘lately beene seene vpon the coast of France’, which, when soberly considered by those ‘of good iudgement […] presageth, the ruine and confusion of those unholy leaguers, vpholden by the Pope and the king of Spaine.’2