by Neil Hanson
Drake had “inflamed the whole country with a desire to adventure unto the seas . . . every place where any profit might be had,” but not everyone who sailed with him was equally enamoured of him. Short, stocky, bearded and florid-faced, he had a spark in his eye suggesting a quick humour, but he was also a man of ferocious temper and black moods, and often suspicious to the point of paranoia of other men’s motives and intentions. He could be abrupt, “boastful of himself as a mariner and a man of learning,” and “a willing hearer of every man’s opinion, but commonly a follower of his own.” Sir Richard Grenville, “a gentleman who has always sailed with pirates[,] . . . would not serve under Drake”; Martin Frobisher bore him a deep antipathy after serving under him in 1585–86, and Richard Madox, a ship’s chaplain who sailed with him in 1582, showed his own enmity in his sarcastic description of Drake as “that golden knight of ours.”
Others, even among his enemies, formed a more balanced view. He was “forceful . . . feared and obeyed by his men . . . firm in punishing, alert, restless, well-spoken, ambitious, vainglorious, but generous and liberal; not a cruel man,” and he inspired loyalty and affection among most of his men, and not merely because he made them rich. Even his detractors were forced to admit to his brilliance as a naval commander; if Parma was the greatest land commander of his age, Drake had no peers at sea: “one of the greatest mariners that sail the sea, both as a navigator and as a commander.” “He was more skilful in all points of navigation than any that ever was before his time, in his time or since his death,” and his attention to detail included having careful paintings of uncharted coasts and harbours made by his brother John, Francis Fletcher and other skilled members of his ships’ companies, to form “rutters” (route maps) that would allow himself and others to navigate those coasts in the future. Captured Spanish charts were almost as highly prized by Drake as the plunder that could be obtained, and his pursuit of efficiency on his ships extended to the search for plunder and prizes. He was a master of subterfuge and planned and prepared his operations with meticulous thoroughness, then struck with lightning speed, daring and savage force, but he also treated captives, indigenous peoples and runaway slaves with exemplary fairness, and in return gleaned much valuable intelligence and sometimes military assistance from them.18
He was the first to “recognise that the ship was the fighting unit, not the soldiers on board,” and he made sure that his ship and its equipment and crew were the best available. One Spanish nobleman captured by him recorded that Drake’s galleon was “a perfect sailer . . . as well mounted with artillery as any I have seen in my life, [carrying] about thirty heavy pieces of artillery and a great quantity of firearms with the requisite ammunition and lead . . . manned with a hundred men all of service and of an age for warfare, and all are as practised therein as old soldiers from Italy could be . . . He treats them with affection and they treat him with respect.” The discipline Drake imposed on his men extended to the spoil and plunder they took—“no man dared take anything without his orders”—but his own ascent from humble origins also strengthened his revolutionary belief in his oft-stated maxim that a ship’s crew must be “of a company,” under the command of a single captain, and that the gentlemen and officers must “haul and draw” alongside their seamen. It was inconceivable that any Spanish nobleman would have soiled his hands with such manual work but, initiated by Drake, it had become common practice aboard English ships by the time of the Armada.
Even the Lord Admiral, Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, Earl of Nottingham—one of the few members of his mainly Catholic family not to carry the taint of treachery—was at pains to familiarize himself with the work of his ship and the men who crewed it, and the increase in efficiency and morale that this generated played no small part in English naval success. Howard had been an admiral since 1570 and was made Lord Admiral of the Fleet in 1585, like three of his ancestors before him—his father had commanded the English escort that brought Philip of Spain into Southampton for his wedding to Mary Tudor—but he had no experience of active service at sea, and owed his position to his social rank. He and his wife, Catherine Carey, daughter of the Earl of Hunsdon and a favourite lady-in-waiting of Elizabeth, were both closely related to the Queen and linked by birth or marriage to almost all the great families of England. He had held a series of glittering posts ever since Elizabeth had made him her ambassador to France at the tender age of twenty-three, and if he owed his rapid early advancement as much to his youthful good looks as to any innate abilities, he was industrious and effective enough to retain the royal favour long after a succession of younger men had caught the Queen’s eye. He was a Knight of the Garter and Lord Chamberlain of the Household, and as General of Horse had played a leading role in putting down the Rising of the North in 1569. A commissioner at the trial of Mary, Queen of Scots, he was one of the loudest voices calling for her execution. Fifty-two at the time of the Armada, Howard was “no deep seaman but he had skill enough to know those who had more skill than himself and to follow their instructions . . . the Queen having a navy of oak and an admiral of osier.”19
Drake, his Vice-Admiral, would not have been human if he had not resented being outranked by a man who, in naval if not social terms, was his clear inferior, and his lowly birth also made him insecure and aggressive, particularly when his authority was challenged by men of more noble origins. He had no public disputes with Howard during the Armada campaign, though the fact that the two men were hostile to each other ever afterwards suggests that matters were different in private, but others felt the lash of Drake’s refusal to allow any man aboard his ships to question his actions. Drake regarded seamen as “the most envious people of the world and so unruly without government” and he demonstrated the firmness of his own rule during his voyage of circumnavigation. In July 1578, as the Pelican reached St. Julian’s Bay in the far south of South America, Thomas Doughty made strong objections to the course of action Drake proposed. “This gentleman must have sustained this opinion with more vigour than appeared proper to the General [Drake]. His answer was that he had the gentleman carried below deck and put in irons. On another day, at the same hour, he ordered him to be taken out and to be beheaded in presence of all” for incitement to mutiny. On another voyage, Drake also sentenced Sir William Borough to death for treason, though he was later reprieved. Drake was undoubtedly a solitary figure; there is no evidence of a long-term friendship with any man, and his wife was routinely left alone for months and even years while he was away at sea. Even aboard ship, among those to whom he perhaps felt closest, he was isolated by his position; the lengthy, wide-ranging conversations he held with captives aboard his ships may hint at the loneliness of this driven, friendless but brilliantly successful man.
In his mid-forties, Drake was at the peak of his powers and reputation. On 24 September 1585, after twelve months kicking his heels while awaiting the Queen’s permission to sail, he began his latest voyage of reprisal. He had prepared with all speed and sailed at the head of twenty-one great ships, two of them, the Bonaventure and the Aid, the Queen’s own galleons. Among the captains sailing with him were Thomas Fenner, Frobisher and Wynter. Drake told them that if storm damage or other calamity should force them to put in to port early in the voyage, they should do so in France or Ireland rather than on the English coast, in case the Queen had yet again changed her mind and issued orders to recall them. In the event, the voyage to Spain proceeded without incident and Drake first put in at Vigo, terrorizing the town, rescuing the crews of the embargoed English ships from jail and allowing them to sail for home, and helping himself to provisions for his ships. For ten days he wreaked further destruction on the coast of Galicia, sacking villages, looting, burning and desecrating Catholic churches, and capturing twenty-six ships.
Drake then sailed for the New World, arriving in Hispaniola on 26 November, and for the next six months he terrorized Spanish shipping and settlements. On New Year’s Day, 1586, he captured Santo Domingo, the ca
pital of the western empire, and then sacked Cartagena, the richest city in the New World and the embarkation point of the treasure brought from the silver mines of the interior. Unfortunately for Drake, he missed the flota by a hair’s breadth: “It escaped us but twelve hours the whole treasure which the King of Spain had out of the Indies this last year.” With scurvy, typhus and dysentery wreaking havoc among his crew, he was forced to sail for home. The voyage was a financial failure, returning only fifteen shillings in the pound to the Queen and the merchant adventurers who had backed it, and Elizabeth was furious at the lack of profit, but Drake had done considerable damage to Spanish possessions and struck an even more telling psychological blow. The mere mention of his name was enough to strike fear into Spanish ships and settlements on both sides of the Atlantic, and such was his renown that even the knowledge that he was at sea was enough to prevent the treasure fleet from sailing. No silver from the New World reached Spain throughout the rest of 1586, and as a result many Spanish merchants were brought to the brink of ruin and the Spanish treasury was bare. The King’s Principal Secretary tried to put a brave face on it—“The English sting us much, perhaps God permits it thus for something better”—but it was “such a cooling to King Philip as never happened to him since he was King of Spain.” 20
Despite the constant English raids on Spanish possessions, Elizabeth’s support in money and men for the Dutch rebels defying Spanish rule, and Philip’s support for plots and insurrections against her and his well-advanced preparations for invasion, the two rulers had always played out a charade of innocence. Like a schoolteacher bemoaning her inability to control her charges beyond the school gates, Elizabeth claimed that, even when utilizing the Queen’s galleons, her mariners were outside her direct control, mere private citizens exacting due reparations for previous losses rather than instruments of state policy, but Drake’s voyage from 1585 to 1586 ended the charade for ever. Within a week of receiving the news of Drake’s latest depredations, Philip had recalled his envoy, Count de Feria, informed Pope Sixtus that he was planning the invasion of England, and begun urgent preparations for war.
The trigger was only partly Drake’s raids on the New World, even though the vast wealth of precious metals mined and shipped to Spain was the financial underpinning of Philip’s entire empire. Gold production had entered a steep decline as early as the 1570s, but the output of silver, particularly from the great Potosi mine high in the Andes, doubled in value between 1570 and the time of the Armada. Between a fifth and a third of the silver shipped back to Spain in each year’s flota was the property of the Crown, and part of the fortunes earned by other Spaniards from this bonanza also found its way to Philip’s coffers in taxes. His annual revenues exceeded the combined total of all the other European states and princedoms, but he could not sustain the Armada, the Army of Flanders or any of his other imperial ambitions if the flow of wealth from the treasure fleets was interrupted. It was also increasingly difficult for Philip to obtain credit from his bankers, since he could not guarantee that the treasure fleet would arrive intact. Drake had now disrupted the annual voyage of the flota on two occasions, but his raids were an irritation rather than a disaster for Spain and English dreams of capturing the entire treasure fleet were never realized. From the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth century, no more than one treasure ship in forty was lost and fewer than one in five even of those losses was caused by the attacks of privateers or warships.
If raids on the flota and the New World colonies were a considerable provocation to Philip, attacks on the Spanish mainland, whether Elizabeth willed them or not, were a different matter entirely. They amounted to a declaration of war on Spain, and it was a challenge that Philip was bound to accept. There could be no further pretence, for even more than the Dutch rebellion, Drake’s impudent raids threatened to shake the whole precarious edifice of Philip’s sprawling empire. If the all-powerful sovereign could be so taunted and humiliated on his own coastline, how could he hope to defend or maintain control of dominions thousands of miles away? “With this pirate at sea in such strength, we cannot defend any island or coast, nor predict where his next attacks may come, so it is uncertain what we can do to prevent them.” Spain had been attacked, the King’s forts had been destroyed, his warships sunk, his merchantmen captured and their cargoes plundered. Philip’s reputation in Europe and his honour within his own country required the insult to be avenged. 21
CHAPTER FOUR
Smoking the Wasps fro Their Nests
In late 1586, Francis Drake heard reports of the strength of the fleet being assembled in the harbours of Spain and Portugal, and burned to be at sea once more, attacking Spanish ships and settlements and securing a few more fat prizes. As winter turned to spring, he urged the Queen to let him “smoke the wasps out of their nests,” certain that if he could only strike hard and early, before the Armada had even set sail, he could deal it a blow from which it might never recover. But Elizabeth was distracted, maintaining her public display of grief at the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and Drake was also in temporary disfavour, excluded for the moment from the inner circles of the Court, in punishment for the losses she had sustained from his last voyage. Elizabeth, as was her invariable custom, also hesitated and prevaricated. Early in her reign, she had taken the decision to send her navy to help defeat the French forces in Scotland and establish a Protestant state there only after changing her mind three times in a fortnight. On this occasion she exceeded even that indecision, sending Drake no fewer than four contradictory orders in a matter of days. “Give me five vessels and I will go out and sink them all [the Spanish fishing fleet off Newfoundland] and the galleons shall rot in Cadiz harbour for want of hands to sail them. But decide, Madam, and decide quickly. Time flies and will not return,” Drake wrote, but for crucial weeks and then months Drake and the rest of her pirate admirals were kept cooling their heels.
Still fearful of provoking too open a breach with Philip, when Elizabeth at last gave Drake her permission for a new voyage, her commitment was discreet and hedged around with restrictions, and she exercised her right to appoint the second-in-command by sending Sir William Borough with him “for the express purpose of tempering his rashness.” The Royal Letters Patent permitted him to set sail “for the honour and safety of our realms and dominions. We do of our authority Royal and of our certain knowledge, give full power and jurisdiction to you to punish and correct.” His squadron was to cruise the oceans looking for prizes, but the Queen’s commission also allowed him to “impeach the purpose of the Spanish fleet and stop their meeting at Lisbon” even if that meant “distressing their ships within their haven.” She authorized him to take six of her ships, four front-line galleons and two fast pinnaces, and to negotiate with London merchants for as many more ships as they were willing to offer him. The Lord Admiral, Charles Howard, offered his own galleon and pinnace, and Drake also had four ships of his own waiting at Plymouth. His commission was dated 25 March 1587, but a few days before this Mendoza had already heard through his network of agents that Drake was equipping the Queen’s ships.1
On 28 March, Drake signed agreements with the London merchants and the Queen’s ships sailed from Gravesend to rendezvous with his own at Plymouth. Alongside his flagship, the Elizabeth Bonaventure, were three other galleons—the Golden Lion, the Dreadnought and the Rainbow—and three ships of the Levant Company. The risks from pirates and corsairs on the Barbary Coast during their normal trading voyages meant that the Levant ships were almost as heavily armed as the galleons. There were also seven smaller men-of-war and a dozen frigates and pinnaces. Drake led them into Plymouth Sound on 4 April, but remained there only a week, completing the equipping and provisioning of the ships “in a furious hurry,” driven partly by the pressing need to strike the Spanish fleet while it still lay unprepared at anchor, but also by the fear that Elizabeth would once more change her mind and issue orders cancelling his commission. An ordinary traveller would take at least a week t
o cover the 215 miles from London to Plymouth, but a courier with a royal dispatch, travelling “by post” using a series of horses stabled at inns and post-houses roughly ten miles apart, could make the journey in as little as thirty-six hours.
Drake had let it be known that he was once more making for the riches of the New World, but as rumours began to circulate about his true destination, recruitment of seamen ground to a virtual halt and the ones already aboard deserted in droves. “When Drake announced last summer that he was going to attack the Indian flotillas men flocked to him eagerly and he could have armed 200 ships . . . but now they come very reluctantly and almost by force.” It was one thing to risk your life for the chance of a fortune attacking treasure ships on the Spanish Main; it was quite another to beard Philip’s ships in their own harbours, braving the guns of the forts and shore batteries. The same rumours had inevitably reached Mendoza. “With the exception of Drake himself, not a soul on the fleet knows what the object of it is, but various surmises are afloat, one to the effect that they are going to prevent the junction of His Majesty’s fleet in Spain, destroying a portion of it as it will have to be fitted out in various ports.” By 26 February he had reports that an English fleet “would shortly sail for the Straits of Gibraltar” and he at once sent word to Spain that Drake’s target was probably Cadiz or Lisbon.2
As desertions increased, Drake suspected treachery, as he was always prone to do, and appealed to the local authorities to apprehend the deserters. He also wrote to Lord Howard that actions “so injurious to the Queen’s service” required the most draconian punishment. He replaced the missing men with soldiers from the local garrison, and when the five remaining ships of the London contingent sailed into Plymouth on 11 April he at once made preparations to put to sea. Mendoza was again informed by “the Fleming I have there [in Plymouth] and from other quarters.” “No living soul knew what the design was to be. The Queen would not have even the Lord Admiral informed, as she considers him a frank-spoken man, but judging from general indications and the haste in sending Drake off, it would seem as if the intention was to try to prevent the junction of Your Majesty’s fleet . . . to this end they had let out a few words to Drake about Cadiz being a good port to burn the shipping in.” Mendoza’s prediction proved remarkably accurate but Philip received the dispatch only when Drake was already entering Cadiz. Yet even without inside information, his choice of target should not have been a complete surprise. Lisbon, the Armada’s principal assembly point, was approached by a long, difficult and well-defended channel that even Drake might have jibbed at entering, but Cadiz, the main port of assembly after Lisbon, though guarded by shore batteries, was easy of access and egress and commanded a crucial position near the juncture of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.
