1st Edition
State Papers relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada 1588, Vol. II
These are chiefly 'State Papers' in the narrow sense of records of the English Secretary of State, but include other English government documents from the Public Record Office and the British Museum.
Vol II August to December 1588. In appendices Vol.II prints a list of the English fleet; letters of Captain Thomas Cely from a Spanish prison in 1579; a proposal to increase seamen's wages in 1585; a translation of Medina Sidonia's narrative as printed in Fernandez Duro's La Armada Invencible; and a list of the Spanish fleet, chiefly from Fernandez Duro.
The Mary Rose has now been unveiled in her entirety, marking the end of the 34-year project to preserve her after she was raised from the seabed in 1982. Viewers can now see the ship clearly, unmasked by glass or conservation jets. In 2017 The Naval Miscellany Volume VIII was published with details of her last campaign in 1545. To study the broader context of the Mary Rose, particularly the history of the second Mary Rose, a 29-gun galleon built in 1555 which fought in the Spanish Armada. She features in both volumes of 'State Papers Relating to the Defeat of the Spanish Armada', the first two volumes ever published by the Navy Records Society.
Full Introduction in Volume 1. The Defeat of the Spanish Armada: Letters ordered by Date and Corresponders, Full Index.
Biography
John Laughton was born in Liverpool on 23 April 1830, son of a Master Mariner. He was educated at the Royal Institution School, Liverpool and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read mathematics and graduated as a wrangler in 1852. He entered the Royal Navy as an instructor, joining his first ship, Royal George, in 1853, serving in the Baltic during the Crimean War. In 1866 he went ashore to teach at the Royal Naval College at Portsmouth, moving with the College to Greenwich in 1873, becoming Head of the Department of Meteorology and Marine Surveying.
In the 1870s he turned more to teaching history, delivering a famous lecture to the R.U.S.I. in 1874 on the importance of actually analysing historical events, rather than merely reporting them chronologically. This new approach meant that he "acted as a catalyst for the entire intellectual development of naval history as an independent discipline" (Andrew Lambert). He was an undoubted influence on naval thinkers of the time: Alfred Thayer Mahan, Julian Corbett and Herbert Richmond. In 1885 he left the Royal Navy to accept the position of Professor of Modern History at King’s College, London, and succeeded in convincing the Admiralty to allow limited public access to their archives. With Admiral Cyprian Bridge he founded the Navy Records Society in 1893. He wrote more than 900 entries on naval personalities for the Dictionary of National Biography. He was knighted for his work in 1907, awarded the Chesney Gold Medal in 1910 and died on 14 September 1915.
