The Confident Hope of a Miracle by Neil Hanson

Hanson also depicts the terrible fate that befell the seamen of both sides long after the decisive battles were over, and he takes a fresh, hard look at Elizabeth I, shaking the pedestal of “England’s greatest ever monarch.” Neil Hanson, the acclaimed author of The Great Fire of London and The Custom of the Sea, brings the story to vivid life, tracing the origins of the conflict from the Old World to the New, delineating the Armada campaign in rousing prose, and illuminating the lives of kings and popes, spymasters and assassins, military commanders and common sailors, and the ordinary men and women caught up in this great event when the fate of nations hung in the balance. The story of the Spanish Armada is one of the great epics, with a cast of characters as rich and varied as any in history, with results that shaped Europe for centuries to come. But English ships, tactics, weapons and crews were much superior to those of the Armada, and the pious and ascetic Philip’s “confident hope of a miracle” to give him victory was not fulfilled. All that stood between Spain and victory was the English Navy. A battle-hardened Spanish Army waited in Holland, ready to crush England’s barely trained conscripts, many armed only with scythes, stakes or longbows. In 1588, determined to reclaim England for the Catholic Church, King Philip II of Spain launched a fleet of huge castle-crowned galleons that stretched for miles across the ocean. He further claims that Queen Elizabeth was a monarch who left many of the survivors of the battle to die of disease or starvation and whose parsimony, prevarication and cynicism left her unable to make crucial decisions.ĭrawing on previously undiscovered personal papers, Neil Hanson conveys in vivid detail how the highest and the lowest in the land fared in those turbulent months when the destiny of all Europe hung in the balance.The Confident Hope of a Miracle is a gripping account of the defeat of the Spanish Armada–the defining international event of the Elizabethan age. In this controversial study, Neil Hanson claims that Francis Drake's intention was not to sink the Armada ships but to disable and plunder them. From the first whispers of the threat against England and the English crown, to the return of the battered remnants of the fleet to Spain eighteen months later, it is a story rich in incident and intrigue. This breathtaking overview of one of the most fascinating campaigns in European history begins with the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the event that precipitated the launching of the Armada.

In the winter of 1587 the Spanish Armada, the largest force of warships ever assembled, set sail to crush the English navy.

The Confident Hope of a Miracle by Neil Hanson