The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story

"Roughly one hundred and thirty ships and thirty thousand men made up the armada, dispatched by a royal fanatic who thought that 'he could organize a huge opreation of war without leaving his study'. As commander he appointed his ranking duke, the hapless, unmilitary, and gallant Medina Sidonia. Reluctantly and obediantly the duke set sail, to fight running engagements in the Channal, to meet disaster by fireship and battle, to be let down by his colleague on land, the Duke of Parma, and to flee to the cold, uncharted northern seas, only to face shipwreck and massacre on the Scottish and Irish coasts. Fewer than half the men and ships returned from this terrifying Anabasis." (From the inside flap of The Voyage of the Armada)

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David Howarth's The Voyage of the Armada: The Spanish Story easily ranks among my favorite history books. Period. Historical narratives truly do not get better than this. 

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Some writers are able to take history, and turn it into an apallingly dull affair. By the time they're finished, you'd think history was just a bunch of facts, numbers, names and dates. A dislike of history can indicate at least one or two things: one, you've got problems; or two, you've been reading poorly-written history books. 

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Thankfully, however, there are writers who are able to make history interesting, and David Howarth is among them. History books like his are the ones worth reading. They have the power to make you love history in a way you might never have thought possible. 

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The Voyage of the Armada is well-written, engaging, and stretches the mind. Set during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, it recounts the history of the Spanish Armada sent by the Catholic King of Spain to invade Protestant England. Until the publication of this book, the story of the Armada had been told primarily from the English viewpoint, which made the English victory into a puffed up tale of national heroism far from the truth. Howarth brilliantly redresses that imbalance. Drawing from a vast collection of previously unexplored Spanish sources, he tells the Armada's story from a different perspective - the Spanish perspective.

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From the book...

"... the soldiers were marched back to the quays and taken in boats and shut up in their ships again. They were the only people who were supposed not to know what the fleet was for. A few weeks earlier, the king himself had sent instructions that the soldiers and sailors had better be told they were going to the Indies.  But for once his instructions were ignored; it was too late for deception.  Everyone in Lisbon knew the truth.  All over Europe, indeed, everyone of consequence knew it: the fleet was bound for the conquest of England.  The men who manned it had not been told a lie, as the king proposed.  Officially, the had not been told anything at all.  But even the most dimwitted of them had been discussing it for months.  Without any information, their ideas of England, and of what they were in for, can only have been the vaguest: a cold, wet, windy and altogether unpleasant island for to the north - barbaric and said to be guilty of devilish heresies.  Rumor said the conquest would be easy."

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David Howarth, historian of Waterloo, the Norman Conquest, and other turning points in history, lives and writes in Sussex, England.

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Persevero,