Treaty of London (1604)

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The Somerset House Conference.

The Treaty of London, signed in 1604, concluded the 20-year Anglo-Spanish War. The terms were largely favourable to Spain, but also amounted to an acknowledgement by Spain that its hopes of bringing England under Spanish control were at an end. The negotiations took place at Somerset House in London and are sometimes known as the Somerset House Conference.

After the death of Queen Elizabeth in 1603, her successors began negotiating an end to the bitter and costly conflicts that had characterized the later years of her rule. Besides the early successes at Cádiz and Gravelines in the 1580s, the war with Spain had not gone well for England. A huge fleet action had been repulsed off the coast of Portugal with heavy losses in 1589. Thousands of soldiers had been deployed against professional Spanish armies in France and Flanders with only marginal success. A Catholic guerrilla war in Ireland (Nine Years War (Ireland)), occasionally supported by Spain, drained England of men, money and morale. England's treasury, sapped by the necessities of war and by the decades of funding Protestant rebels in France and the Spanish Netherlands, was depleted. Crop failures and plagues had also damaged the kingdom.

Furthermore, privateering efforts in the Spanish Main had been suppressed in recent years by improved Spanish defenses; both John Hawkins and Francis Drake died at sea during a disastrous attack on Puerto Rico in 1595. English offensives at sea, including an attempt to capture the Azores in 1597, met largely with failure: Cádiz was again attacked in 1596, causing terrific damage to the city, but this time the Anglo-Dutch forces came away empty handed, unable to seize the treasure fleet at port. English attacks on Atlantic shipping met with rapidly dwindling successes against the well protected trans-Atlantic convoys (flotas), and suffered defeats against the greatly improved post-Armada Spanish navy; the increased inflow of precious metals from America enabled Spain to sustain, for a time, its wide ranging military efforts.

But in Spain, too, decades of incessant warfare against the Dutch rebels, the French and the English, coupled with the task of guarding the Mediterranean against the Ottoman Empire, had taken its toll. By the 17th century, finances were exhausted by the need of maintaining Spain's famous but expensive professional army, powerful navy, and the upgrading of port defences throughout the Spanish Main, Europe, and around the world, leaving the Spanish economy in shambles. The situation was aggravated by a large scale plague that had swept through Castile.

Spain's wars, moreover, were not justified in the substance of their results. Despite committing a significant fraction of Spain's military power against the Dutch, Phillip II was unable to completely subjugate the rebellious Dutch provinces, thereby remaining caught in an expensive, endless, military quagmire (the Eighty Years' War). For this reason Philip III welcomed England's James I's pledge of non-intervention in Continental affairs, which had been the principal aim of the Spanish Armada of 1588. However Philip II's other goals of placing a Catholic monarch on the English throne (unlikely after the execution of the best contender in Mary I of Scotland) or at least of winning official tolerance for English Catholics, were not to be realised.

England and Spain remained at peace until their forces met in 1654 during the Anglo-Spanish War and in the Franco-Spanish War.