Contra Armada by Luis Gorrochategui Santos

In addition, the author wonders himself how these two similar episodes, two great naval disasters, could have received such differing historical attention. Historical facts were transformed into a self-interested version describing a sort of knock-out blow to the Spanish Empire far from the reality of the situation. Wernham (3) in gathering the English sources of the Drake-Norris expedition in a single volume.įurthermore, the English Armada episode becomes crucial when considering that British historiography used – particularly in the Victorian era – the failure of the previous Spanish Armada to build a national myth around it. It is also worth pointing out the good job done by R.

Gorrochategui goes further: he thinks that with Portugal under English control, it would have opened new horizons for England in the Americas, considering Portuguese territories overseas. ‘The story of this ill-starred expedition is usually disposed of in a few lines by English historians, although it success would have completely changed the status of England on the Continent’.

Hume was the first to proclaim the importance of that campaign previously consigned to oblivion: Hume (2) dedicated a full chapter to the Counter-Armada in his work The year after the Armada (1896). There are a few exceptions: for instance, the British Hispanist Martin A. The author contrasts this fact with the vast literature produced on the Spanish Armada. Gorrochategui’s thesis is that little attention has been paid to the Counter-Armada by historians, particularly in the English-speaking world.

According to the author, these pamphlets – the first by Anthony Wingfield (1) – were taken for reliable sources by British historians. Only a few propaganda pamphlets were published in order to hide the truth, treating real but unfavorable facts as false rumors and instead showing a false aftermath of the campaign favorable to the English. The Queen prohibited any publication about the English Armada (also known as the Counter-Armada or Drake-Norris expedition) trying, successfully, to hide the disastrous result suffered by the English in that military campaign on the Iberian mainland.

Interestingly, although Queen Elizabeth I was at first intentionally misinformed about this, once she knew the grim reality, she silenced it. It sheds new light on an obscure, but fundamental, episode of the undeclared Anglo-Spanish War (1585-1604) that took place a year after the Spanish Armada. Gorrochategui’s book is a revised and updated translation of the Spanish edition (Spanish Ministry of Defence, 2011).

Contra Armada by Luis Gorrochategui Santos