The first page shows Sir John Hawkins writing a dispatch to Walsingham dated from on board the Victory in the North Sea on 10 August 1588.
Perhaps the best thing to do is to plunge into the middle or just beyond and then work back and forth as Colin Martin and Geoffrey Parker do in The Spanish Armada. Gibbon began with a detailed description of a Roman legion, which is fair enough and interesting for its own sake, but some of our authors go so far back that one looks for Niall of the Nine Hostages on the next page. Yet it is exceedingly difficult to know just where the borders of the context lie, and indeed where any historical account should start. They differ very much in approach, in emphasis, and even in conclusion – Mia Rodrigues-Salgado, for example, feels that the enterprise increased Philip II’s reputation, particularly in the north – but they all of course agree in trying to place the disastrous voyage in its context.
All these books are concerned with what the Spaniards once called the Felicissima Armada and what the English still, with a quiet smile, call the Invincible Armada (apparently it was Burleigh who first thought of the word, shortly after the event).
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