The Spanish Armada

304 Pages·1992·6.488 MB·English

by  Colin Martin, Geoffrey Parker

THE SPANISH ARMADA
Colin Martin was bom in Edinburgh in 1939 and was educated
at Aberdeen Grammar School. After working as a civilian flying
instructor he became a free-lance writer and photographer, specialising
in history and archaeology. He learned to dive with the Army in
Cyprus and in 1968 joined the expedition which located the Armada
wreck Santa María de la Rosa off SW Ireland, becoming its archae­
ological director. He subsequently directed archaeological work on
two other Armada wrecks, La Trinidad Valencera (off Donegal) and
£/ Gran Grivón (Fair Isle).
In 1972 he founded the Scottish Institute of Maritime Studies at the
University of St Andrews, where he now holds a readership in the
Department of Scottish History. He is a Member of the Institute of
Field Archaeologists and an Associate of the Institute of Archaeological
Illustrators and Surveyors. He has published a general account of his
work on the Armada wrecks, Full Fathom Five: the Wrecks of the
Spanish Armada (1975) and in 1983 he gained a Ph.D. for a thesis on
die Armada.
Geoffrey Parker was bom in Nottingham in 1943 and was educated at
Nottingham High School and Cambridge University. He was a fellow
of Christ’s College, Cambridge, from 1968 to 1972, and then taught
for 14 years in the Modem History Department at St Andrews
University in Scodand before becoming the Charles E. Nowell Distin­
guished Professor of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-
Champaign. He is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the Real
Academia de la Historia (Madrid). In 1992 he was awarded the Grand
Cross of the Order of Isabella the Catholic by the King of Spain.
His published works include: The Army of Flanders and the Spanish
Road (1972); The Dutch Revolt (1977), Pelican 1979): Philip II
(1978); Europe in Crisis (1979); The Thirty Years’ War (1984); and
The Military Revolution (1988).

COLIN MARTIN
& GEOFFREY PARKER
THE SPANISH ARMADA
W • W • NORTON & COMPANY
New York London
Copyright © 1988 Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker
First American edition, 1988
First published without illustrations as a Norton paperback 1992
All rights reserved
ISBN 0-393-30926-6
W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.
500 Fifth Avenue, New York, ny ioi 10
W. W. Norton & Company, Ltd
10 Coptic Street, London wcia ipu
Printed in England
1234567890
For Paula and Jane

Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction xiii
Chronology xix
PART I: THE FLEETS APPROACH
i ‘The greatest and strongest combination’ i
2 ‘A fleet to impeach it’ 19
PART II: GOD’S OBVIOUS DESIGN
3 ‘The great bog of Europe’ 39
4 Armed neutrality, 1558-80 50
5 Cold war, 1581-85 63
6 The Grand Design and its architect 74
7 Phoney war 92
8 The Armada takes shape 104
PART III: IT CAME, WENT, AND WAS
9 The advance to Calais 125
10 The Banks of Flanders 148
11 Anatomy of failure 162
12 ‘God breathed’ 184
PART IV: THE ARMADA IN HISTORY
AND LEGEND
13 Victors and vanquished 209
14 If the Armada had landed 225
Source notes and references 237
Index 27 3

Acknowledgements
This book saw its genesis, gestation and birth in the thirteen years
from 1973 to 1986, during which we were colleagues at the
University of St Andrews. We are deeply grateful to that institution
for encouraging our research, and for the generosity of its Research
and Travel Fund in sponsoring so many of our rewarding quests.
Other grants have helped us to conduct further research in archives
and libraries, and to excavate wrecks lying off the coasts of Scotland
and Ireland. We are indebted to the British Academy, the Carnegie
Trust, the Leverhulme Trust, the Mac-Robert Trusts and the
Russell Trust, all of which have given generous support over the
years.
The archaeological work which has yielded so much new infor­
mation about the Armada would not have been possible without the
far-sighted encouragement of the Ulster Museum, Belfast, and the
Shetland County Museum, Lerwick. This has resulted in financial
support, conservation services, and — most important of all — the
safe housing of the recovered material as intact collections which
have been, and remain, rich sources for study. We warmly thank
these institutions, and the staff members with whom we have had
the pleasure of working, for the trust they have placed in us.
Our primary debt is to the phalanx of friends and colleagues who
have so unstintingly supported us along the way. We can only name
the leading few, but we also remember and acknowledge our debt to
the remaining many. Mr Sydney Wignail must top the list for
demonstrating, in 1968, that the discovery of Armada wrecks could
lead to exciting new historical conclusions: he also put the first-
named writer through the stern apprenticeship of diving in Blasket
Sound, where the wreck of the Guipúzcoan vice flagship Santa
María de la Rosa was discovered. We salute him, and all the other
divers with whom we have been associated - most especially the
members of the City of Derry Sub-Aqua Club, whose unselfish
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
forethought has safeguarded the remains of La Trinidad Valencera
for posterity. We have also received valuable assistance from the
Streedagh Armada Group and the Moville Sub-Aqua Group. Here,
too, we must acknowledge the contributions made by the profes­
sional diving archaeologists who have helped with the work on the
wrecks: Dr Nick Dixon; Mr Andrew Fielding; Mr Jeremy Green;
Mr Tony Long; the late Mr Keith Muckelroy; and Ms Celie
O’Rahilly.
Help in a variety of forms has freely been given by the following
scholars, and we gratefully record our debt to them: Dr Simon
Adams, University of Strathclyde; Professor José Alcala Zamora,
University of Madrid; the late Dr Richard Boulind; Professor J.R.
Bruijn, University of Leiden; Dr Trevor Dadson, Queen’s University
Belfast; Mr Alan Ereira, BBC; Mr Laurence Flanagan, Keeper of
Antiquities, Ulster Museum; Dr Tom Glasgow Jnr; the late Mr Tom
Henderson, Shetland Museum; Dr John de Courcy Ireland, Mari­
time Institute of Ireland; the late Mr Paul Johnstone, BBC; Dr Piet
van der Merwe, National Maritime Museum; Dr Marco Morin; Dr
Jane Ohlmeyer; Professor Peter Pierson, University of Santa Clara;
Mr Ray Sutcliffe, BBC; Dr I.A.A. Thompson, University of Keele;
Dr Brian Scott, Queen’s University Belfast; Dr Robert Sténuit; and
Mr Andrew Williamson, Curator, Shetland Museum. We are also
grateful to the following for research assistance: the late Nico
Broens; Lucy Byatt; Louis Haas; Jill Hawthorne; James Reid; and
Bill van de Veen.
Officials and staff of the many libraries and archives in which we
have had the privilege of working have been—as always—unfailingly
helpful and friendly. The institutions concerned are Usted in die
sources, and no discourtesy is intended by omitting to name them
individually here. We must also thank Ms Penelope Hoare of Hamish
Hamilton for her sympathetic editing of a work which grew in scale
and scope far beyond the limits originally set for it.
Our final debt is to Mrs Paula Martin, who has been associated
with the project almost from its inception. As a diving archaeologist
she has worked on two of the wreck sites; as a scholar she has
generously laid at our disposal the fruits of her own researches and
made many helpful comments on the text; and as a secretary she has
provided us with a meticulous typescript.
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