Evermore in the main

IN 1959, Garrett Mattingly, a professor at Columbia University, wrote a landmark account of the Spanish Armada of 1588. No one, until now, has supplanted it. Partly this is because so little in the perception of Tudor history changed for the next 30 years. But then, seismic shifts began. Queen Elizabeth ceased to be seen as the ruler of all she surveyed. Her grasp of power, and even her competence, started to be challenged, while Protestantism is now known to have been less popular than previously thought. Foreign policy was rarely dictated by the Crown; much of it emerged from the private initiatives of merchants and adventurers. Elizabethan politics were less ideological, the queen less committed to a European Protestant cause, than Mattingly's cold-war generation had imagined.