Word: sidonia
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...gloomy!" she cried to friends gathered at the small cafe in Madrid. "When I get out, we will go to the country and roast a lamb." With that, Luisa Isabel Alvarez de Toledo Maura, 32, Duchess of Medina Sidonia, crossed the street to a courthouse to begin serving a one-year prison sentence. The duchess, whose title* is one of the most venerated in her country, was convicted of illegal protest when she led the villagers of Palomares on a protest trip to Madrid on the first anniversary of the crash of a U.S. bomber bearing a load...
...descendant of the 7th Duke of Medina Sidonia who, as an admiral, led the Spanish Armada against England...
...only 5 ft. tall and she weighs just 901bs., but Spain's ponderous judiciary moved to confront her with all the caution of a broken-horned bull facing a top-ranking torero. She was, after all, the Duchess of Medina Sidonia, three times a grandee of Spain, and she had proved herself a troublesome opponent in the past. In 1967, she was arrested for her role in organizing a farmers' protest march to demand additional U.S. compensation for damages suffered when three U.S. nuclear bombs accidentally fell near Palomares. This time, the problem centered on an explosive novel...
Seagoing Brothels. Elizabeth rewarded him with knighthood, but the King of Spain was less appreciative. He resolved that "England shal smoake," and in 1588 the Duke of Medina Sidonia sailed north with the mightiest naval armament of the age. According to Hakluyt, there were 30,000 men in 134 ships, among them several seagoing brothels and 64 enormous floating forts. The British fleet made a far less impressive array: 12,000 men in 100 ships, and beside the Spanish galleons the British men of war looked like overdecorated dinghies. But the British ships had the advantage of "dexteritie," and most...
East of Calais, Drake closed in for the kill. "I dout it not," he wrote to Lord Charles Howard, his commander in chief, "but ere it be long so to handle the matere with the Duke of Sidonia as he shal wish himselfe at St Mary Port among his orenge trees." Ere long indeed the desperate duke was driven into "the boisterous and uncouth Northren seas," where many of his "battered and crazed ships" were wrecked. "Insomuch that of 134 ships there returned home 53 onely small and great...