A Year of Dreadful Portent
To astrologers and other seers of the period, 1588 [C.E.] was a year of dreadful portent. All manner of omens, from an alleged rain of blood in Sweden to a series of monstrous births in France, pointed to some earth-shaking catastrophe. Much of the foreboding harked back more than a century to the German astronomer Regiomontanus, author of the star tables used by Columbus and of a horoscope for the current year. According to Regiomontanus, there would be an eclipse of the sun in February, followed by two total eclipses of the moon. Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, harbingers of war and chaos, would linger in baleful conjunction in the moon’s house. “If land and sea do not collapse in total ruin,” Regiomontanus had concluded, “yet will the whole world suffer upheavals, empires will dwindle and from everywhere will be great lamentation.” Students of numerology, sifting through the Bible, found reasons for alarm in the Book of Revelations and in selected passages from Isaiah. Events since the birth of Christ appeared to have moved in complex but predictable cycles, and the last cycle would conclude, with apocalyptic finality, in 1588. Surely the fall of some great kingdom was at hand. As to the identity of the kingdom, there was lively speculation. Spain—Europe’s only true empire—was a likely candidate for toppling, and nervous mariners throughout her possessions began deserting their ships in the ports where the Armada was assembling. To counter the mounting apprehension, King Philip ordered sermons denouncing all forms of wizardry and soothsaying. In England the omens seemed particularly worrisome; the second lunar eclipse, in August, would fall on the cusp of Virgo, Queen Elizabeth’s birth sign. Like Philip, the English government tried to dispel the fears, issuing a pamphlet to refute the soothsayers. Catholics in France, presumably too full of Gallic elan to contemplate their own downfall, predicted Almighty punishment for the English Jezebel.
— The Armada, p. 63
