Drake became England's new national hero, but to the Spanish he was a pirate and a terrorist, and the two nations' diametrically opposed views of him reveal him as the central figure in the Tudor Cold War between Protestant England and Catholic Spain.
Drake is introduced as the focal point of the shadow Anglo-Spanish war: England's greatest maritime hero since Henry V and before Nelson, and simultaneously Spain's most detested figure, 'El Drago' the dragon, loathed for centuries.
transcript
Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook: Drake became the single most detested figure in Spain. And it helped that his name El Dra in Spanish meant the dragon. And to this day in Spain, he plays the role of a kind of bogey man. The kind of the mirror image of Drake's status as a hero in England is this notion of a kind of predatory paratical monster in Spain. He almost single-handedly gives the English um what they did not previously have which is the self-confidence to think of England as as as possibly becoming the mistress of the seas.
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