Heroes_Saviors, Traitors, and Supermen_A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  The English were as certain of divine favor as the Spanish. Protestant Englishmen like Drake read Foxe’s account of the Protestant martyrdoms under the Catholic Queen Mary, Philip’s wife, and adumbrated an idea of Spain as persecutor of true religion which exactly mirrored the Spanish vision of England. More generally Spain was envisioned as an outpost of Hell, a place of bloody magnificence, its grandeur based on the sufferings of thousands upon thousands of African and American slaves and illumined by the ghastly fires of the auto-da-fé.

  In 1587 Drake told Walsingham he and his men stood “as one body … for our gracious Queen and country against Antichrist and his members.” “God will help us,” wrote Hawkins to Walsingham, “for we defend … our religion, God’s own cause.” Both fleets were well provided with priests; in both, services were held on every ship daily, and the crews were obliged to attend not only for their own spiritual welfare but to bring luck to their side. Philip II gave orders that all the Armada troops should avoid oaths and blasphemies because God would reward the virtuous and punish the sinful. And so, in the opinion of the English, he did.

  For six days the Armada sailed eastward through the English Channel, at first in a crescent-shaped line two miles long, later in a tight circle. The English fleet followed behind. The Spanish ships were crammed with armed men ready to grapple and fight, ship to ship, hand to hand. The English were equipped for the newer style of naval warfare, one in which the work was done by big guns. Accordingly they kept their distance.

  The Spanish were powerless to inflict any harm on the English. Juan Martínez de Recalde explained their problem with prescient accuracy before they even set sail: “If we can come to close quarters, Spanish valour and Spanish steel and the great masses of soldiers we shall have on board will make our victory certain. But unless God helps us by a miracle, the English, who have faster and handier ships than ours, and who know their advantage just as well as we do, will never close with us at all, but lay off and batter us with their culverins, without our being able to do them any serious hurt.” The English were equally incapable of harming their opponents. They could run rings around the Spanish ships, but their guns were not powerful enough at long range to do any serious damage. During the six days the two fleets took to pass through the Channel the English fired “a terrible value of great shot,” but not a single Spanish ship was sunk; few were even disabled. “We pluck their feathers by little and little,” wrote Howard optimistically, but in truth he was not able even to do that.

  At last, on the seventh day of the pursuit, the Armada came to rest near Calais. There Medina-Sidonia received the shattering news that Parma had never received any of the messengers sent to inform him of the Armada’s approach. His army would not be ready to set out to sea for six days. That night the English sent fireships into the Armada. They did little harm but the Spaniards panicked. Nearly all of them cut their cables, leaving behind the anchors whose loss would cost so many of them their lives on the return journey, and retreated in disorder. The next morning, off Gravelines, before they could properly reform, the two fleets finally joined battle.

  This was the fight which would enter English history books as “the defeat of the Spanish Armada,” but to those who took part in it the engagement appeared inconclusive. By the end of it the Armada was battered but still battleworthy, while the English were almost entirely out of ammunition. Parma’s men were still being embarked. But the next day—as the medal struck in England to celebrate the occasion has it—“FLAVIT,” “HE BREATHED.” A wind came up, threatening to force the Armada onto the shoals off the Flemish coast. The English stood safely out to sea and prayed. God’s allegiance seemed to waver: the wind dropped. But then, next morning, HE breathed again, and this time what the deity exhaled was recognized by all concerned as a Protestant wind. Before it the Armada, still battleworthy, was swept helplessly away northward to meet the terrible sequence of storms, including one of the only two typhoons to have hit the North Atlantic in the last five hundred years, which reduced it by the time its remnant returned home to Spain to barely more than half its original strength.

  Warfare, wrote the great medievalist Johan Huizinga, is a form of divination. When Rodrigo Díaz volunteered to clear his name by submitting to a judicial duel, he was following the very ancient belief that to come through mortal combat alive and victorious is to demonstrate one’s virtue and one’s status as God’s (or the gods’) chosen one. All duels, most drunken fistfights, and a great many wars have derived at least part of their motivation from the notion that the winner of a fight proves conclusively that he is the “better man.” In a holy war especially the outcome both proves and is determined by the partisanship of the deity. The result of the Armada campaign was decided, as both parties had expected it would be, by divine intervention. It was read by the English as a clear indication that God was a Protestant, by the Spanish as a terrible signal that he considered them unworthy to represent his holy Catholic Church. King Philip sank into a depression from which he never fully recovered. Queen Elizabeth wrote a verse celebrating her victory and the divine favor of which it was evidence:

  He made the winds and water rise

  To scatter all mine enemies

  What part Drake played in all this is a matter of dispute. Howard seldom mentions him in his reports. To the Spaniards, however, he was the paramount Englishman. He was their bugbear, the man they wished to make scapegoat for all Protestant Europe. A young Spanish woman whose dreams were recorded by her priest between 1587 and 1590 sees him repeatedly in her nightmares as a clever, bold, and utterly ruthless persecutor of all Catholics. In ballads circulating at the time he appears as the sole representative of England:

  My brother Bartolo

  Is sailing for England

  To kill el Draque

  The whole great Armada had been assembled, according to the testimony of a Spanish prisoner who may not have been privy to the complexities of his king’s foreign policy but who was unquestionably voicing what many of his compatriots believed, because “it was not convenient that one Drake, with two or three rotten ships, should come always, and at his pleasure, to spoil the havens of Spain.” One Spanish gentleman became so excited in demonstrating to his friends what he would do to Drake, were he ever to lay hands on him, that he shot a bystander dead.

  Alcibiades’ glittering reputation led the Athenians to assume that their navy’s successes in the Hellespont were all his, because among the admirals he, rather than the superbly competent but less flashy Thrasybulus, was the one of whom great things were expected. So Drake, being already a popular celebrity, was given the credit for all his colleagues’ achievements, for the use of fireships (actually the initiative of William Winter), for Howard’s strategy, even for the ultimate dispersal of the Armada, for which the better informed of his contemporaries gave most of the credit to God and which modern historians, saying the same thing in a different idiom, ascribe to luck and the weather. Drake, always a braggart, helped to magnify his contribution. “He reporteth that no man hath done so good service as he,” said Frobisher furiously afterwards, “but he lyeth in his teeth.” But fame is a self-propagating phenomenon. No amount of swaggering by Drake could have made him as celebrated as he was. Only rumor could do that, and the almost universal tendency to believe a good story regardless of its claims to authenticity. “Have you heard how Drake with his fleet has offered battle to the Armada?” exclaimed the Pope, whose agents must certainly have informed him of Howard’s existence, but who preferred to ignore it. “With what courage! … He is a great captain.”

  In fact he was Howard’s vice admiral. Howard treated his charismatic deputy with great generosity and tact, and Drake, as second in command, was sufficiently high placed to have his own way with impunity while remaining free of cramping responsibility.

  When the Armada was first sighted off the coast of Cornwall, an awful wall of ships two miles long sailing steadily eastward with a following wind, the English fleet wa
s at Plymouth. One of the best-known legends about Drake relates that he was playing bowls when the news of the Armada’s imminent approach reached him and that he insisted on playing out the game. Stow, writing in 1600, has it that the English “officers and others kept revels on the shore … at the instant of the foe’s approach,” but the story of Drake’s bowls dates from over a hundred years after the event and his famous words, “There is time to win the game and beat the Spaniards too,” were first published in 1835. The story is in many ways implausible. The playing of bowls in a public place was illegal under Puritan legislation which Drake himself would probably have endorsed: one of his few actions as a member of Parliament had been to introduce a bill forbidding bearbaiting, hunting, and hawking on the Sabbath. (The queen, who enjoyed bearbaiting, vetoed it.) But true or not, it’s a story Drake would probably have liked, and it neatly conflates the Drake his contemporaries knew, the impudently irreverent rule-breaker with a penchant for self-congratulation, with the marmorial calm of the Stoic hero. (Cato, on the day of his defeat in the consular elections, gave evidence of his sublime imperturbability by playing a ballgame on the Field of Mars.)

  In fact the English had twenty-four hours’ notice, thanks to a patriotic pirate who had raced to Plymouth to report sighting the Spanish off the Lizard—more than enough time for a game of bowls. But if Drake played until the tide turned, as soon as it did he set to work. If the Spanish chose to blockade the entrance to Plymouth Sound, the English fleet could be trapped inside. With contrary winds pinning them ashore the English ships had to be towed out by rowing boats, or hauled out on their anchors. It was a desperately slow and laborious process, but by the following morning the entire fleet was at sea. For twenty-four hours, in dreadful weather, they struggled against the wind. Half the ships sailed, hidden by the rain, straight across the front of the Armada and back around its southern wing. Another group, probably led by Drake, traveled perilously close inshore with the wind almost dead against them to pass the Armada’s northern tip. At dawn on July 21, as the Spaniards approached Plymouth, they sighted the English fleet for the first time, not ahead of them, boxed into harbor, but chivvying them from behind with the advantage of the wind. The entire exhausting, perilous maneuver had been—as it happens—unnecessary. Medina-Sidonia, under orders to avoid battle, would almost certainly have sailed straight past Plymouth, leaving the English fleet to issue out unmolested and follow in his wake. But neither Howard nor Drake knew that. For fighting sailing ships the “weather gauge,” the windward position, was a decisive advantage. The English had made sure they had it by thirty-six hours of ceaseless, back-breaking, and frightening work by the sailors, and by a combination of enormously skilled seamanship, local knowledge, and imaginative energy that can surely be credited to Drake.

  Two days later, off Portland Bill, the ships under Drake’s command played a crucial part in a ferocious battle. “There was never seen a more hot fight than this was,” wrote Howard. On another occasion a Spanish supply ship was isolated and set upon by a group of English ships, almost certainly led by Drake. As the Armada passed the Isle of Wight it was he who led an attack on its southern flank which very nearly succeeded in driving the Spanish onto some shoals. Medina-Sidonia saw the danger and changed course in time, but Drake had at least ensured that, even had they wished, the Spanish would not be able to enter the Solent, a possible starting point for the immediate invasion on which the English generally imagined them to be intent.

  The fireship attack off Calais which broke up the Armada’s formation and its morale has often been credited to Drake. In fact it was William Winter who proposed it, but Drake did give two of his own ships to be burned. In the battle at Gravelines the following day, the last engagement of the campaign, he led the English into battle but at some point in the day he sailed on, apparently in pursuit of those Spanish ships which were escaping into the North Sea. Martin Frobisher later asserted that he had done so either because his nerve for battle gave out, or because he preferred chasing prizes to fighting for his country—“I know not whether he be a cowardly knave or a traitor, but the one I will swear”—but Frobisher by this time was so angry with Drake that his opinion cannot count for very much. According to the narrative by Pietro Ubaldino, Drake stayed so close to the thick of the fighting that twice cannonballs came crashing into his own cabin, the first breaking the bed, the second taking off a gentleman’s toes.

  Frobisher’s fury relates to the only one of Drake’s actions during that momentous week which has been widely recorded. Off Plymouth two Spanish ships collided. The Nuestra Señora del Rosario, commanded by Don Pedro Valdés, was so disabled that Medina-Sidonia, judging it impossible to take her in tow, ordered the fleet to abandon her and sail on. It was a tough decision, not only because Valdés was one of the Armada’s most distinguished commanders and his ship large and well armed, but also because she was one of the Armada’s pay ships. Her cargo included 52,000 ducats, about a third of the Armada’s money.

  Howard, too, wanted to keep his fleet together. Recognizing the temptation she presented, he gave explicit instructions that the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was to be left where she was. That night, as the English followed the Armada up the Channel, he ordered Drake to lead the way displaying a lantern on his stern for the rest of the fleet to follow. There are two versions of what happened next. According to Drake his lookout reported ships traveling in the opposite direction to the south. Thinking that the Spaniards might be trying to do what he and Howard had done before, creeping back around the enemy under cover of darkness in order to get the advantage of the wind before morning, he resolved to investigate. Not wanting to lead the entire fleet off course, he extinguished his lantern, turned back, overtook the mysterious ships, discovered them to be harmless German freighters, and set off the rejoin the fleet. The story is just about plausible, but only Drake’s most unflinching supporters have believed it, because while the English fleet wandered without a guide in the dark—Howard finding himself at dawn dangerously close to the Armada’s rear—Drake took possession of the Nuestra Señora del Rosario.

  He had deliberately disobeyed orders and imperiled the whole fleet in order to sneak back and grab a prize, but his action was almost universally applauded. When news of the capture reached London bonfires were lit. The incident presented the spectacle of a Spanish ship overpowered by an English one, a spectacle otherwise sadly missing from the story of the Armada. Besides, the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was the richest prize of the whole campaign and Drake was not the only person in the Channel that week to be motivated by cupidity.

  Both parties to this latest holy war hoped for plunder as fervently as the crusaders of old. Medina-Sidonia promised his men the glory of doing God’s work but assured them as well that the expedition would be “profitable also because of the plunder and endless riches we shall gather in England.” The English were equally greedy for loot. Lord Admiral Howard missed most of the climactic battle at Gravelines: he wasted that crucial morning attempting to take possession of a Spanish ship which had gone aground off Calais. (Eventually the French, who wanted the takings for themselves, succeeded in seeing him off, bombarding his ship from the shore.) Even Martin Frobisher, who fulminated so furiously against Drake afterwards, was not making a principled protest. What enraged him was not that Drake was a deserter who had preferred loot to duty, but that he, Frobisher, might not get his cut. “I will make him spend the best blood in his belly,” he declared, because he “thinketh to cozen us of our share of fifteen thousand ducats.”

  Discreditable as the episode may seem, it did nothing to dim Drake’s reputation. Gold-greed, lawlessness, and a preference for going his own way were, after all, among the qualities for which he was celebrated. And the circumstances under which the Nuestra Señora del Rosario was taken were designed to heighten his renown even further, not because it was so hard, but because, like so many of his most splendid successes, it was so easy. Towards the end of Rodrigo Díaz’s life
King Musta’in of Zaragoza, who had once been his employer, declared, “I would not myself dare to engage him in battle.” By 1588 Drake’s reputation, like the Cid’s, was so formidable that it did his fighting for him. The Nuestra Señora del Rosario had fifty-two guns and a crew of 450 men, all of whose duty it surely should have been to keep her and her treasure out of English hands, but when Drake called upon him to surrender, Valdés did so without firing a shot. He afterwards declared that it was no shame to surrender to a commander of “valour and felicity so great that Mars and Neptune seemed to attend him.” Drake’s fame was now so tremendous that, like Achilles showing himself on the ramparts around the Greek camp, he had only to be present to put the fear of death into his opponents. He came, he was seen, and he conquered.

  It was the last of Drake’s glory days. The aftermath of the Armada campaign was bitter for those Englishmen who had fought in it. The English fleet began to pursue the Spanish northwards but storms and disease soon halted the hunt. Drake put in at Margate with typhus on his ship. The men could not be discharged because there was no money with which to pay them. Their food was turning rotten; soon as many men were dying of food poisoning as of disease. There were not enough clothes. The English ships and soon the streets of Margate, Harwich, and Broadstairs filled up with corpses. Howard and Drake went to London to report on the situation but were given inadequate funds and no sympathy. In Spain the survivors of the Armada returned to find hospitals set up to receive them in every port, and they were all paid. In England the government economized by deliberately lethal procrastination. “By death, by discharging of sick men and such like … there may be spared something in the general pay,” wrote Burghley—the later the money was given, the fewer seamen there would be left alive to demand it. While Elizabeth rode her white horse at Tilbury, posed for her portrait, and struck her medals, the sailors who had, according to the triumphalist rhetoric of the time, won such an audacious victory for her in repulsing the invincible Armada, were left to die, naked, filthy, starving, and unpaid.