ABSTRACT

The Expedition to Cadiz, 1625 The Duke of Buckingham’s ambitious but disastrous expedition to Cadiz in 1625 is recorded in three very different ‘autobiographical’ journals by three individuals who each had a deep personal interest in the expedition and in how to represent themselves in relation to it. The first is The Voyage to Cadiz in 1625. Being a Journal Written by John Glanville, Secretary to the Lord Admiral of the Fleet (Sir E. Cecil), Afterwards Sir John Glanville, Speaker of the Parliament, &c., &c., first printed by the Camden Society in 1883.1 This is the record of the expedition by its official Secretary, apparently offering a purely factual journal of the voyage and minutes of the councils of war ‘holden abord the Anne Royall’. The second is a self-justifying account by the beleaguered Lord Admiral of the Fleet himself, A Journall, and Relation of the action, which by his Majesties commandement Edward Lord Cecyl, Baron of Putney, and Vicount of Wimbledon, Admirall, and Lieutenant Generall of his Majestys forces, did undertake upon the coast of Spaine, 1625.2 And the third, in a quite different populist idiom, is a rare printed book of 1626 narratively entitled Three to One: Being, An English-Spanish Combat, performed by a Westerne Gentleman, of Tavystoke in Devon shire, with an English Quarter-Staffe, against Three Spanish Rapiers and Poniards, at Sherries in Spaine, The fifteeene day of November, 1625. In the Presence of Dukes, Condes, Marquesses, and other Great Dons of Spaine, being the Counsell of Warre. The Author of this Booke, and Actor in this Encounter, Richard Peeeke.3 The documents and manuscripts in the Calendar of State Papers Domestic contain several other records of the Cadiz expedition, including letters from various commanders on the voyage, mostly of complaint at its mismanagement. But the three texts chosen here – one a transcript of an original document, the others short printed quarto books – vividly illustrate the authorial stresses of recording personal experiences in a dangerously shifting public arena in which the writers are always accountable. Their written records they know will be the subject of intense scrutiny. These texts thus occupy a position at the furthest remove from those diaries or journals for which no obvious or apparent reader seems to exist. They reside firmly in the public and political world that generates and shapes them. In each of them too, in different ways and with different effects, the writers reveal – or conceal – themselves and their motives in discourses that, while conforming to the rhetorical and generic expectations of their readers, exhibit an urgent need both to organize ‘facts’ to their own advantage and to invent for themselves a voice to meet the personal, political and social requirements of the moment.