BURGHLEY, William Cecil, 1st Baron. Certaine Advertisements out of Ireland, Concerning the Losses and Distresses happened to the Spanish Navie, upon the West coastes of Ireland, in their voyage intended from the Northerne Isles beyond Scotland, towards Spaine.

London: By I. Vautrollier for Richard Field, 1588. Small quarto. pp. [20]. Nineteenth century half morocco on marbled boards.’ title in gilt on morocco label. From the Macclesfield Library with their armorial bookplate and blind stamp. A fine copy. Extremely rare.

JISC locates 2 copies only of this separate edition. WorldCat 2. STC 15412. ESTC s108407. Not in Sweeney
Primary contemporary source of the defeat of the Spanish Armada - one of the defining moments in English history. By William Cecil, sometimes attributed to Richard Leigh. Usually found as part of The copie of a letter sent out to England to Don Bernardin Mendoza ... . William Cecil Lord Burghley (1520-1598) Minister of State, the only son of Richard and Jane Cecil. He was knighted in 1551, the year before his father died, leaving him large estates in Rutland, Lincoln and Northampton. On her accession, Elizabeth I at once appointed him chief secretary of state. In 1571 he was created Baron of Burghley. He said, addressing one of his correspondents, he was “the poorest lord in England “. Theobalds was one of his many mansions, where Queen Elizabeth was often entertained. He was first Chancellor of Trinity College, Dublin, on its foundation in 1592.
An extremely rare contemporary account of the destruction of the Spanish Armada along the western
seaboard of Ireland. Attributed to William Cecil, Lord Burghley, chief minister to Queen Elizabeth I, the pamphlet forms part of the earliest printed reports issued in England following the catastrophic dispersal of the Armada in 1588. Having been driven northwards by the English fleet, the Spanish ships attempted to return to Spain by sailing around Scotland, only to be wrecked by storms along the coasts of Donegal, Mayo, Galway and Clare.
Several wrecks occurred off the Mayo coast, including near areas such as Blacksod Bay, Broadhaven Bay, and the wider Atlantic seaboard. Contemporary English intelligence reports from Ireland, exactly the type of information reflected in this pamphlet, described the fate of ships and crews reaching those coasts.
The importance of this pamphlet is that it belongs to the very first printed wave of reports describing those Irish disasters. In effect, it is one of the earliest printed notices circulating in England that the Armada had not merely been defeated at sea but had been broken and scattered along the Irish coast.
Of particular Irish interest, the pamphlet forms part of the earliest printed reports describing the wreck of Spanish Armada vessels along the western coast of Ireland in 1588.
The Irish landings caused considerable alarm within the English administration. Thousands of Spanish sailors reached shore, raising fears that survivors might join forces with Gaelic lords hostile to English rule. Publications such as this therefore served not merely as news but also as instruments of political reassurance, presenting the Armada’s destruction as both providential deliverance and proof that the Irish situation remained under control.
Printed in London by the Huguenot printer John Vautrollier for Richard Field, later associated with Shakespeare, the tract belongs to a small group of ephemeral government news pamphlets produced in the immediate aftermath of the Armada campaign. Such publications were cheaply printed and widely circulated but seldom preserved, accounting for their extreme rarity today.
Provenance: the celebrated Macclesfield Library (North Library armorial bookplate and blind stamp).
Richard Field was not only an important London printer but also a native of Stratford-upon-Avon, the same town as William Shakespeare. Their fathers knew each other, and it is widely believed the two men were acquainted from youth. Field later became one of Shakespeare’s earliest printers. Most notably he printed: Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece. These were Shakespeare’s first published works, issued just a few years after your pamphlet.
John Vautrollier was a French Huguenot refugee printer who settled in London in the mid-sixteenth century after fleeing the religious conflicts in France. Like many Protestant printers arriving from the Continent, he brought with him technical skill and connections within the European book trade. Vautrollier quickly became one of the most respected printers in Elizabethan London, producing theological, historical and scholarly works. His shop also trained several important printers, including Richard Field, who later married Vautrollier’s daughter and inherited the business.

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