Only bad weather helped it avert a true disaster when the Spanish armada tried to invade in 1588. While Spain swam in wealth from South America, it took Britain centuries to achieve global prominence. Bloodshed followed as the English turned on one another and squabbled over the country’s new, non-European identity. A petulant Henry cursed wretched foreigners and launched his own Brexit by leaving the church of Rome. In the end, Catharine won the argument and the pope refused him a divorce. Henry was always going to lose, but the absurdly high esteem in which he held both himself and English history made him blind to this. A self-deluding Henry thought he could out-argue Catherine, but she was smarter and stronger. Most importantly, England had recognised for centuries that the senior court for matters such as divorce also lay in Rome. This was known as Christendom and was run from a foreign capital by the pope. Henry thought he was cleverer than those in charge of the great European union of the time. Catherine, however, failed to produced a son. But Henry also saw himself as a manly man – and one who needed another man to reign after him. Henry VIII’s first major decision as monarch was to marry Catherine, who was his brother Arthur’s widow, and maintain the Spanish alliance. Henry VIII, as painted by Hans Holbein the Younger. Whereas England was in retreat, Spain was widely admired as a nation of plucky fighters who had just conquered the Muslim kingdom of Granada. It meant that they had managed a tie-up with the great Spanish royal family. It is not surprising that the insecure Tudors were thrilled when Isabella’s daughter, Catherine of Aragon, arrived in England as a young bride-to-be. The next two centuries of European history, and the first global empire on which the sun did not set, belonged to Spain – “which, to say truly, is a beam of glory,” as Francis Bacon later observed. Instead, a female Spanish monarch – Isabella of Castile – backed Christopher Columbus. But the Tudors were inward-looking, insular types. The Columbus family had tried but failed to interest the Tudors in exploring the Atlantic Ocean and backing a venture that would change the next 500 years of world history. It had lost most of its territory in France and, in comparison to bold and dynamic Spain, was decidedly puny. He came from an England with big ideas about itself, but which was essentially in decline. He liked music, drank beer, danced a good jig and also liked women – although he was somewhat scared of them, which explains why he chopped off their heads. “The new copyright law allows Spanish media outlets - big and small - to make their own decisions about how their content can be discovered and how they want to make money with that content,” she added.Henry seemed like a jolly chap.
Writing in a company blog post on Wednesday, Google Spain country manager Fuencisla Clemares welcomed the government move and announced that as a result “Google News will soon be available once again in Spain”. This means Google no longer has to pay a fee to Spain’s entire media industry and can instead negotiate fees with individual publishers. The service closed in Spain in December 2014 after legislation passed requiring web platforms such as Google and Facebook to pay publishers to reproduce content from other websites, including links to their articles that describe a story’s content.īut on Tuesday the Spanish government approved a European Union copyright law that allows third-party online news platforms to negotiate directly with content providers regarding fees. Google announced Wednesday the reopening of its news service in Spain next year after the country amended a law that imposed fees on aggregators such as the US tech giant for using publishers’ content.
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