The Spanish Armada
Author of several Tudor histories, Hutchinson takes on the event fabled as the apex of Elizabeth I’s reign, her 1588 triumph over Spain’s Phillip II’s attempted invasion of England. A subject identified with a classic, comprehensive account, The Armada, by Garrett Mattingly (1959), its naval details are Hutchinson’s focus in this presentation. Exemplified in a 30-page table of every ship in the English and Spanish fleets, his attention to battle at sea, sixteenth-century style, induces wonder at how Phillip and his high command thought they could succeed. From assembling the Armada to supplying it to navigating it to communicating with the Flanders-based invasion force, the operational challenges in retrospect seem daunting. But this was a religious war, Phillip’s play to restore Catholicism in England, and hope of divine succor, evident in documents Hutchinson quotes, impelled the Spanish forward. Spain’s hope mirrored the Tudor government’s fear of a Catholic rising, and its intelligence network and actions against suspected opponents furnish an additional theme. Culminating with the Armada’s ghastly shipwrecks in Ireland, Hutchinson’s day-by-day story of the Armada is a fine production for maritime history buffs. --Gilbert Taylor--This text refers to an alternateHardcoveredition.