England and the Spanish Armada: The Necessary Quarrel, and: The Confident Hope of a Miracle: The True Story of the Spanish Armada (review)

Despite their titles, both of these books cite Spanish material only when it is available in English and therefore, of necessity, shed light primarily on how English men and women acted (or reacted) when faced by the growing power of Spain. McDermott paints a broader canvas. He starts his account of England's perceptions of Spain with the Papal Bull of 1493, and the Treaty of Tordesillas the following year, which divided the commerce, colonization and Christianization of the world between Spain and Portugal, and ends with the English embassy sent to Spain to sign a peace treaty in 1605. He stresses the rise of English privateering from the 1540s as the key underlying cause of hostilities, with "the first cold war" between the two powers in the 1560s and '70s (chapter five), and "failed brinkmanship" leading to outright war in the 1580s (chapter eight). The next seven of his sixteen chapters concern the naval confrontation of 1587 and 1588. Hanson, by contrast, devotes virtually all of his twenty chapters to the naval duel of those two turbulent years.

Not only do both authors virtually ignore the copious Spanish sources, they also mangle virtually every Spanish proper name (and also many French and Italian ones) that they include. All this is hard to explain. On the one hand, the main Spanish sources on the growing conflict with England between 1568 and February 1588 are almost all easily available in the magnificent La Batalla del Mar Océano edited by Admiral Jorge Calvar Gross and a team of erudite colleagues (3 vols. with six parts; Madrid: Turner, 1988–93; Hanson includes only the first volume in his bibliography.) On the other hand, even if the authors cannot read the necessary foreign languages, surely they could have found colleagues or copy editors with the requisite skills to get at least the proper names right? Equally hard to explain is the fact that, in citing English sources, both authors almost always eschew printed versions and instead refer readers to the original manuscripts. McDermott offers a clear explanation of why he has rejected the texts of so many of his sources published by Julian S. Corbett, Papers Relating to the Navy during the Spanish War, 1585–1587 (1898; reprinted, London: Navy Records Society, 1987) and by John Knox Laughton, State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, Anno 1588, 2 vols. (1895; reprinted, London: Navy Records Society, 1981). The "occasionally idiosyncratic transcriptions, and late Victorian practice of 'correcting' contemporary grammar and sentence structure," he declares, "have inclined the present author to refer to the original manuscripts for quotations." This seems fair enough—if often unnecessary. Thus on page 369 n 17, he discusses a document that he claims readers will find in the Public Record Office (now the National Archives) under the call number "EKR/64, 9." No reader can do this, since no such class now exists. Fortunately, as McDermott himself notes, readers do not need to visit the National Archives for this item, because Corbett reproduced it in full in The Spanish War, 27–32. Corbett provided a call number that was correct when he wrote—"QR [= Queen's Remembrancer] Exchequer Accounts, Bundle 64, number 9"—but in the early twentieth century this item became "PRO E 101/64/9," and that is where the persevering reader will find it today. If McDermott found the document for himself in the PRO, rather than plucking it from one of those despised "late Victorian" editors, it seems strange that he does not give its current call number.

Nevertheless, whether in print or in manuscript...