The Return of the Armadas: The Last Years of the Elizabethan War against Spain 1595-1603

The defeat of the Spanish Armada did not put an end to Spanish sea power, nor to Spain's ambitions in northern Europe. By the mid-1590s Spain had recovered from the disaster of 1588, and the renewed naval wars together with the outbreak of rebellion in Ireland from the principal themes of this book. R B Wernham sets out to examine these major events of the last years of the Queen Elizabeth's reign and to assess their impact on English policy. Professor Wernham shows how much of the impetus in foreign policy derived from the Earl of Essex, whose personal ambition and practical incompetence brought frustration and danger, and ultimately led him through rebellion to the Scaffold. It was left to Mountjoy in Ireland, to Leveson and a new generation of sea commanders, and above all to Robert Cecil, to bring war and rebellion to a reasonably satisfactory conclusion. The Return of the Armadas is a superbly integrated and lucidly written study in grand strategy by a leading historian of Elizabethan affairs.

Table of Contents:
The years 1593-1590; the year 1595; Drake and Hawkins' last voyage; Cadiz or Calais?; the Treaties of Greenwich and the Triple Alliance; the Cadiz expedition gets away; the sack of Cadiz; the aftermath of Cadiz; the 1596 Armada; plans and preparations for 1597; gales and frustrations; the islands voyage and the 1557 Armada; the parting of the ways; the peace of Vervins; after Vervins; Cumberland and Van der Does; the invisible Armada and trouble with neutrals; an army for Ireland; Essex in Ireland; conference at Boulogne; Mountjoy in Ireland, 1600; the Essex Rising and the 1601 Parliament; Ostend and Kinsale; last encounters.

Review :
`Professor Wernham succeds in capturing the excitement and paranoia of those times both for the generak and the academic reader in a fascinating and entertaining account of this particularly crucial period of England.' British Bulletin of Publications `a lucidly, even effortlessly, written account of military operations and diplomacy. Wernham's command of his sources, particularly of the State Papers, is the product of a lifetime's scholarship, and will probably never be equalled.' Book Reviews EHR `Wernham's book has the overwhelming merit of understanding and expounding the complexity of the problems facing the English state. ... The diplomatic and military history of the years after the Armadas will not need to be written again for a long time. Wernham's account, based on a lifetime's study of the archives, is scholarly, shrewd and lucid.' History Today `This is an intelligent and well-documented telling, in which the author weaves together matters of obvious and peripheral diplomatic concern, res gestae, and individual personality and agency.' Paul A. Fideler, Lesley College, The Historian