Keeping Up with the TudorsThe Spanish ArmadaBy Robert HutchinsonThomas Dunne Books, 2014 One of the most vigorously readable of modern historians, Robert Hutchinson, addresses in his new book a subject that’s drawn the attention of some mighty readable historians before him. In The Spanish Armada, out this season in a sturdy hardcover from Thomas Dunne Books, Hutchinson tells again the history of Spain’s massive 1588 seaborne attack on the England of Elizabeth I, a story told with real distinction at least twice already in English in the last century, first in Garrett Mattingly’s best-selling and very durable 1959 book The Armada and then in David Howarth’s fantastic 1959 book The Voyage of the Armada.These are some seriously formidable predecessors, and Hutchinson acquits himself very nicely in their company. He lacks Mattingly’s way with sharply precise turns of phrase (a way Mattingly shared with his friend Bernard DeVoto but which isn’t exactly ubiquitous in the discipline half a century later), and he lacks the no-nonsense beauty of Howarth’s prose, but he brings his own strengths to the task of telling the story of Spain’s King Philip II’s obsessive drive to send the world’s largest flotilla of warships against the island kingdom he once briefly ruled as the husband of Queen Mary I. Hutchinson’s strengths are a bit more mundane than his illustrious predecessors, but they’re equally valuable in their own way: massive amounts of research, a knack for getting inside the lived experiences his facts relate, and an excellent ear for the telling quotation, as when he reflects on the insider knowledge Philip gained of the English:

Philip knew that to defeat England meant he had to destroy its navy to enable him to control the sea. Thirty years before, when he had been such an unenthusiastic husband to Elizabeth’s half-sister, he had noted: ‘The kingdom of England is and most always remain strong at sea, since upon this the safety of the realm depends.’ He was now destined to test the veracity of his maxim.

He also regularly finds grimly funny apropos quotes from his less prominent players, as when an Armada wreck survivor, upon being shipwrecked on the coast of Ireland’s County Mayo, bitterly reflects on the local population:

What these people are most inclined to is thieving and robbing one another so that not a day passes between them without a call to arms, because as soon as the people in the next village find out … that there are cattle or anything else, they come armed at night and all hell breaks loose and they slaughter one another.In short; in this kingdom there is neither justice nor reason, so that everyone does as he pleases.

Hutchinson provides extensive notes and bibliography as well as a painstakingly reconstruction of the Spanish order of battle on the big day, captain by captain, vessel by vessel, crew roster by crew roster. But he works hard to keep his book from becoming dry – sometimes, as in the vignette describing the May 1568 arrival of Mary Queen of Scots in England:

She was dirty, penniless, and like other benighted refugees from civil war, possessed only the grubby clothes she stood up in. But despite her many hardships, the thrice-married, twenty-five-year-old auburn-haired woman – at 5 feet 11 inches tall, towering over her handful of exhausted, dispirited attendants – still exuded the dignity and deportment of a queen. Only the vivacity of her hazel-brown eyes was diminished, sapped by months of fear, heartbreak, and privation.

Our author would be the first to admit we can know nothing whatsoever about the vivacity of anybody’s hazel-brown eyes, but you get the strong feeling he’s indulging in moments like that out of sheer narrative enjoyment rather than pandering. His paragraph on what it was like to actually be in these navies is equally gripping:

Naval battles carry their own brand of particular terror, especially for the inexperienced sailor. The jarring, deafening crashes of repeated cannonades. The sickening, heart-stopping thumps of enemy roundshot smashing into the timber hull of your ship amid the heat, smoke, and confusion. The terrible wounds caused by wooden splinters flying through the air like deadly arrows. The piercing screams of naked fear. The disorientation of sudden and unexpected changes in course as ships manoeuvre to press home an attack or avoid a devastating enemy salvo. Dominating all the horror of fire breaking out – perhaps triggering the explosion of a magazine that would blow your ship out of the water, raining down debris and body parts into the waves. All these sights, sounds and smells constantly assailed every one of the senses. For those on board, driven almost out of their wits by the madness and pandemonium around them, there was nowhere to run to. In a ship fighting a close-quarter battle, there were no hiding places.

More so than its two main predecessors, Hutchinson’s book both the tangled political web stretching between Spain and England and also the fact that chance – in the form of strong, sustained storms the shattered and scattered the Spanish fleet – played a far more decisive role in the famous battle than did English derring-do. This will be the definitive account for the new century.