Matt Elton: For anyone who might be unfamiliar with the story of the Spanish Armada, can you provide a precis – and explain why it still retains such power, even centuries on?
Geoffrey Parker: In 1588, the ruler of the global superpower, Philip II of Spain, tried to take down England, destroy its government, and replace Protestantism with Catholicism. He was unsuccessful, but it was a very close-run thing. It's something of a David and Goliath story. In the later 16th century, England was a small country of about 4 million people facing the might of the Spanish empire, which – if you include Spain and Portugal, Spanish Italy, the Netherlands and all of the indigenous peoples of the Americas – probably totalled around 50 or 60 million people. It was a very unequal struggle.
This book is an update of a volume that you co-wrote with Colin Martin back in 1988. What led you to return to it?
Colin and I were first approached by a publisher to start work on the original version in 1982. Colin, an underwater archaeologist, had dived on three Armada wrecks, and I was researching Philip II. The obvious time to publish the book was for the 400th anniversary in 1988, so we worked on it for six years – and thought we'd done a reasonable job. But, of course, history never sleeps, and we started finding new material almost immediately.
The sea helped
