Heroes: A History of Hero Worship

by Lucy Hughes-Hallett

  Drake himself was handsomely rewarded for his share in the battles, not least by being allowed to keep Don Pedro Valdés and, ultimately, his ransom. “I wish you joy of your prisoner,” said the queen graciously, meeting him in St. James’s Park. Besides, a lot of the money carried on the Nuestra Señora del Rosario went missing before Drake handed it over to Howard. Hakluyt believed “the soldiers [Spanish and English] merrily shared the treasure amongst themselves,” but Drake’s heirs alleged he had kept a good portion of it over and above what he was due.

  He had done well financially but his popularity was running out. His baiting of Spain seemed exciting so long as it was carried on over the seas and far away, but once its consequences were felt in England itself the public turned against him. A Spanish prisoner reported that Drake was “much disliked as the cause of the wars.” Nor was he loved by the seamen on whom his success depended. Ever since he returned from his circumnavigation stories had circulated about his meanness in paying the sailors who risked their lives on his expeditions. Ambassador Mendoza reported to Philip II that the crew of the Golden Hind had never received their share of his booty, a nasty aspersion which is lent credence by the fact that when Drake was trying to recruit men for a further voyage in 1581 the captains refused to sign on unless someone other than Drake would guarantee their pay. In the Caribbean in 1585 his men were hard to control. In Santo Domingo, according to a Spanish witness, they perpetrated “endless atrocities,” using the churches as abattoirs and latrines, breaking open tombs and smashing holy effigies. Drake had to resort to extreme measures to maintain discipline. “This Francis treats his people harshly and hangs many,” wrote one Spanish observer (in fact he hanged two). “With the seamen he is harsh,” wrote another. On returning home and finding they were to be given only half pay, the men rioted. Carleill and the other land captains voluntarily divided their share of the spoils among the soldiers and sailors to make up the shortfall; Drake did not. He did not give money when he ought to have done, and he frequently kept it when he ought not to have done. He had learned from his queen’s example on his return from his circumnavigation how to hide his profits. For the rest of his life his reputation was to be clouded by rumors of false accounting, embezzlement, and, especially, a chariness in providing for his men. He had assumed for himself the autocratic status and the predatory practices of a feudal liege lord, but he was signally lacking in largesse.

  In England his perceived status dwindled, but in Spain, as the traumatic news of the Armada’s failure spread, Drake’s reputation grew ever more tremendous. Defeat could be more easily borne if it was inflicted by a superhuman adversary. In contemporary sources he appears as a sorcerer helped by a familiar spirit. He is demonic, the arch-opponent, the anti-Christ, the “untameable wolf.” But he is also a great man. Spanish poets described him as a “noble English gentleman … skilled in navigation, … shrewd and astute … No one ever equalled him;” as “famous Drake, and yet most infamous;” as “[a] captain … whose glittering memory / will last undimmed through future centuries.” In the eyes of his enemies Drake achieved a wicked grandeur which for his countrymen he never possessed.

  Of the 130 ships which made up the Armada 70 returned to Spain—from the Spanish point of view, devastatingly few; from the English, dangerously many. Immediately Drake began to beg the queen for her commission to harry them at home. Eventually she consented. In April of the following year Drake and Sir John Norris, with whom he had served in Ireland fourteen years before, led out a counter-armada. It consisted of 180 ships crowded with armed men, for this, like the slightly smaller Spanish Armada of the previous year, was an invasion force. Like its predecessor, it was a catastrophic failure.

  The expedition’s aims were diverse and mutually contradictory. Poorly provisioned, poorly planned, and poorly motivated, the fleet began to fall apart almost immediately: over thirty ships turned back without even seeing Spain. The queen wanted the Spanish ships at harbor along Spain’s northern coastline destroyed. Drake led his men first to Corunna, where they landed and overran the unfortified lower portion of the town. They ransacked houses, broke open wine cellars, and went on a drunken rampage which lasted for days. They burned the countryside for three miles around and pursued and slaughtered any Spaniards they could catch. But their assault on the fortified upper town failed. Worse, at Corunna many of the men fell ill with what they first imagined to be a colossal mass hangover, but which seems in fact to have been typhus compounded by dysentery.

  Had they gone on to Santander, wrote an English agent a month later, Drake would have “done such service as never subject had done.” Dozens of the returned Armada ships were in harbor there. “With twelve sail of his ships he might have destroyed all the forces which the Spaniards had.” But he had little stomach for sinking warships: there was no money in it. Instead, disregarding the queen’s instructions, he and Norris resolved on an assault on Lisbon. They had with them a pretender to the throne of Portugal, Dom António, who had been hanging around the English court for years and who, were they to install him as king, could be relied upon to be generous to the English in general, and to Drake in particular. Norris and a small army went ashore to march on Lisbon overland, Drake promising to sail up the Tagus to meet them. For reasons he never satisfactorily explained he failed to do so. The Portuguese declined to rise in support of Dom António. Norris was obliged to retreat ignominiously, harried by Spanish troops. More and more of the men were falling ill. On the march back to the coast nearly a third of Norris’s soldiers died of disease.

  Somewhat desperately Drake and Norris turned towards the Azores in the hope of at least covering their expenses by capturing some treasure. The men were dying by hundreds now. Twice they turned back, beaten by storms. Drake gave up. The counter-armada returned to England having achieved very little and lost much, including the lives of nearly two-thirds of its men and its admiral’s charismatic reputation.

  One of the expedition’s officers reported to Walsingham that in failing to meet Norris at Lisbon, Drake had been either incompetent or cowardly or both. Norris’s soldiers, according to Camden, “spoke disgracefully” of Drake, “as if through his cowardice they had failed of their hoped-for victory.” On the voyage out he had supplemented the inadequate provisions the fleet had been carrying by hijacking French, Danish, and Hanseatic ships and stealing their cargoes. Once the Privy Council began to look into the expedition’s finances, much of the loot, whether legitimately seized from Spain or illegitimately from neutrals, turned out to have unaccountably disappeared. Drake was ordered to return a French ship and both he and Norris were reprimanded for their mismanagement. The queen wrote sourly that Drake had taken more care of his profit than of her service. He was no longer England’s “Golden Knight.” “The leaders were craven,” wrote a pamphleteer in the Netherlands, adding, “The proud Drake was mobbed on his return to Plymouth by the women whom he had made widows.” The soldiers and sailors, unpaid once more, rioted in London. “Drake,” reports a contemporary, “was much blamed by the common consent of all men.”

  It was six years before he went to sea again. Meanwhile he worked with Philip Nichols on the chaplain’s account of his two great successes, Sir Francis Drake Revived and The World Encompassed by Sir Francis Drake, compensating for his contemporaries’ loss of faith in him by burnishing his legend for posterity. In 1592 he wrote the queen a dedicatory letter presenting the former book as a “remembrance” of “service done to Your Majesty by your poor vassal against your great enemy.” The hint was eventually taken. In 1595 he received Elizabeth’s commission to embark on a voyage to the Caribbean.

  He had colleagues: by this time, reported one of his officers, he was considered too “self-willed and peremptory” to be entrusted with sole command. He and his old acquaintance Sir John Hawkins were joint admirals at sea, with Sir Thomas Baskerville in command of the thousand soldiers they carried. Their objectives were the capture of a galleon in Puerto Rico and an assault on
Panama. Neither was accomplished. The expedition was dangerously underprovisioned. The officers accused Drake of keeping for himself money that should have been spent on supplies. The two commanders quarreled, a sad end to their long association. Hawkins died, worn out, off Puerto Rico. Drake carried on, but he had lost his confidence, his luck, and his grip on actuality.

  In the quarter century that had elapsed since his first piratical raids on Caribbean ports the Spaniards had learned to defend themselves. They easily repelled his attack on Puerto Rico. Afterwards he boasted to the younger and less experienced men, “I will bring thee to twenty places far more wealthy and easier to be gotten,” but it was an empty boast. Throughout the voyage he was slow and indecisive, allowing news of his coming to precede him to each of his targeted ports. He extorted some pearls from the inhabitants of Rio de la Hacha then burned the place to the ground. He landed at Nombre de Dios, which he had once called “the mouth of the treasure of the world,” but found little worth taking. He set Baskerville’s troops to march across the isthmus to Panama, as he had once done himself, but the Spanish were ready for them, and they were unable to force their way through. After this repulse Drake, according to Thomas Maynarde, who was with him, “never carried mirth nor joy in his face.”

  He, who had never taken anyone’s advice, asked his officers what they wanted to do next. He was at a loss. He had returned to the scene of his first great triumph, where he had come as a young man among young men and helped himself to what he wanted from every ship in the Caribbean, and he found himself impotent. He was only fifty or so, but he talked with the fretful nostalgia of an old man. The Caribbean was not what it was, he told Maynarde pathetically, “he never thought a place would be so changed.” Even the weather was not as good as he remembered it. There were no ships worth plundering, no vulnerable ports into which he could burst with a handful of men and help himself to stacks of silver. He had returned to his own personal paradise and found it altered, “as it were from a delicious and pleasant arbour into a waste and desert wilderness.”

  The fleet wandered, effectively leaderless. Drake contracted dysentery. While he lay helpless and wretched, his brother Thomas and his wife’s nephew were both in his cabin (or so they later alleged against one another), the one rifling through his possessions, the other pressing him to sign amendments to his will. There was gossip later that one or the other of them tried to poison him, but most agreed that it was sickness that “did untie his clothes” and sorrow that “did rend at once the robe of his mortality asunder.” Late one night he became delirious, jabbering words (presumably either obscene or blasphemous) which those present decided it best not to record, and calling his servant to help him put on his armor so that he might meet his death like a warrior. His wish was not granted. He was forced back into bed, where he died soon after, to be buried at sea, “the trumpets in doleful manner echoing their lamentation for so great a loss.” On returning to England Thomas, his brother and heir, proved himself a true Drake by refusing to pay the seamen’s wages. It was a miserable end.

  “It is good news,” said King Philip II when he was told on his sickbed of Drake’s death. “Now I will get well.” He was wrong—he never recovered—but he was not the only Spaniard to greet the news with exaggerated emotion. All Seville was illuminated and solemn thanksgivings said for the passing of Spain’s great opponent. Lope de Vega celebrated the death of the man who most Spaniards still believed to be responsible for the rout of the Armada (with which de Vega had sailed) with the composition of an epic poem, La Dragontea. In it Drake is a damned monster as magnificent as he is wicked. He is “great-hearted” and all but invincible and the poem climaxes with a coruscating picture of him in his dragonish form; black and green and glittering, his eyes shining like the dawn, his fiery breath lighting up the heavens, “his steely sides impregnable / to all the darts, and all the spears of Spain.” In Hispanic legend Drake was to remain for centuries the marauding Dragon. As late as 1898 a Puerto Rican author wrote that “this new Attila left pain and sorrow behind him; his ships left a red wake of freshly spilled blood.” Seen through Spanish eyes he was a figure of colossal stature and dark splendor, a brilliant evildoer, the supreme opponent of Catholic virtue and good colonial government.

  To his compatriots he was a smaller, more playful character, alternately the impudent trickster who steals the dragon’s hoard and the plucky fellow who dares to fight the dragon and cut him down. In England, for at least two generations after his death, his fame rested on his marvelous success in getting wealth. While the Spanish poet Mira de Amescua was writing a tirade against “This pirate blind in his greed … / This impious glutton for gold and for silver,” Robert Hayman eulogized him as one who “brought back heaps of gold into his nest.” The Golden Hind, which had been kept as a curiosity at Deptford until it became so decayed that its remnants reminded a Venetian diplomat of “the bleached ribs and bare skull of a dead horse,” was broken up in 1662 and its timbers carved into highly prized mementoes. One of them inspired Abraham Cowley’s ode on “Sitting and drinking in the Chair made out of the relics of Sir Francis Drake’s ship,” in which the poet re-created the jubilant wonder Drake’s captured wealth still aroused:

  With gold there our vessel we’ll store;

  And never, and never be poor

  No never be poor any more

  Gradually, though, Drake’s remembered character evolved from that of brilliantly successful fortune-hunter to immortal defender of his people. Wrote Charles Fitzgeffrey in 1596:

  He who alive to them a dragon was

  Shall be a dragon until them again

  In 1620 Henry Holland included Drake in his Heroeologia, his book on great men, and promised that he would one day rise from his watery grave to repel England’s enemies. He had joined the pantheon of dead but death-defeating heroes, the saviors who (like Jesus Christ, King Arthur, and Charlemagne) will one day rise again.

  In 1800, when England was once again under threat of invasion by a European autocrat with his sights set on world domination, an opera called Francis Drake and the Iron Arm was presented to great applause in London. By that time England had a new maritime hero. Horatio Nelson was a man of a very different stamp from Francis Drake, more of a Cato than a bold corsair. Physically frail and morally persnickety, he came close to scuttling his own career at its outset by overzealous adherence to the laws against trading with foreign powers in the Caribbean, the same waters where Drake, with Hawkins, had used cannon shot to persuade reluctant Spaniards to break the rules and buy their slaves. But heartily though they would surely have disliked each other, Drake and Nelson had much in common.

  Nelson was another small man with an inordinate regard for titles and the trappings of success and an appetite for Hispanic treasure. It was not in defending his country against Napoleon’s aggression that he lost his arm but in a raid on a Spanish ship laden with American silver from which, as he wrote his sister, he hoped to “laughing come back rich.” Like Drake he was a man on the make and, like Drake, he was fully aware of the value of celebrity and active in promoting his own image. Drake oversaw the writing of two books about himself explicitly designed to present him as an exemplary hero “for the stirring up of heroic spirits, to benefit their country and eternise their names by like noble attempts.” Nelson wrote self-congratulatory accounts of each of his major battles and an autobiographical memoir ending with the words “Without having any inheritance … I have received all the honours of my profession, been created a peer of Great Britain, etc. And I may say to the Reader, ‘GO THOU AND DO LIKEWISE.’ ”

  Also like Drake, Nelson was an individualist who irritated his peers and exasperated his superiors (eighteen of the admirals invited to his funeral declined to attend) and who was never entrusted with supreme command. To the public he was the man who had held off Napoleon, just as Drake was the man who had repelled the Armada, but in fact, like Drake in 1588, Nelson was one of several officers under an extremely able com
mander in chief. That commander, Earl St. Vincent, wrote after Nelson’s death: “Animal courage was the sole merit of Lord Nelson, his private character most disgraceful, in every sense of the word.” But disgraceful or not, he was loved and venerated, as Drake had been in his heyday, as the only man alive who could have saved his country. After his victory at the Battle of the Nile emperors and kings loaded him with decorations and diamond-studded gifts, highborn ladies inundated him with embroidered sashes, and when he finally returned to England he was mobbed by rapturous crowds who insisted on taking his horses from their traces and dragging his carriage through the streets themselves.

  Nelson considered himself punctiliously loyal. He longed for acceptance into the ranks of the establishment. But the public loved him, as their forebears had loved Drake, for his brilliant acts of insubordination. The telescope-to-the-blind-eye story is mere fable, but it is true that Nelson ignored the signal to withdraw at Copenhagen, and that he broke the line at Cape St. Vincent in direct contravention of all the principles of contemporary naval warfare and of his superior’s orders. He was a prig who said of himself that “conscious rectitude” bore him though all difficulties, but he was adored as a wayward and audacious original after the model of Sir Francis Drake. By the end of the Victorian era the two had become so inseparable in the English popular imagination that Nelson was understood to be Drake’s avatar. In 1908 the poet Alfred Noyes described Drake as “first upon the deep that rolls to Trafalgar.” In 1916, in the middle of the First World War, a letter to The Times reported a rumor current in Devon to the effect that Drake’s spirit was abroad again, as it had been “about a hundred years ago, when a little man, under the pseudonym of Nelson (for all Devonshire knows that Nelson was a reincarnation of Sir Francis), went sailing by to Trafalgar.”