All the Queen's Men (13 page)

Drake's shortcomings as a commander on a large scale were fully exposed during the disastrous expedition to Portugal and the Azores in 1589, when the Queen had hoped to exploit the victory over the Armada. A combination of poor organization and leadership, accompanied by sheer bad luck, led to the complete failure of this ill-conceived venture and a very angry Elizabeth accused Drake of going to places, ‘more for profit than service'.
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Earlier she had suspected that her favourite, the Earl of Essex, had joined the venture and warned Drake, together with the expedition's army commander, Colonel John Norris, that, ‘if Essex had joined the fleet they are forthwith to cause him to be sent home . . . if they do not they shall look to answer for the same, at their smart, for these be no childish actions'.
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The Queen was just as capable of treating her seafarers like naughty schoolboys as her statesmen.

Drake was always circumspect in his dealings with the Queen; nevertheless he was never afraid to take issue with her on matters of importance. So when an ever-parsimonious Elizabeth wished to disband the fleet too soon after the Armada's departure from the English shores purely as an economy measure, Drake tactfully disagreed. ‘My poor opinion is, that I dare not advise her Majesty to hazard a kingdom with the saving of a little change,'
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he carefully yet firmly cautioned. The Queen readily accepted Drake's view.

Drake's last expedition on the Queen's behalf, a joint attack with John Hawkins on Panama, was equally unsuccessful, as a combination of inadequate preparation and ill luck caused them to lose the vital element of surprise. Elizabeth had realized this before the expedition had even set sail: ‘by your own delays you have made your journey and purposes so notorious that the Spaniard has had sufficient warning to provide for your descent,'
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she raged at an unusually subdued Drake and Hawkins while they were still in Plymouth. Elizabeth proved to be correct and the Spanish easily beat off the English attack when Drake and Hawkins eventually arrived off the coast of Panama. This proved to be the final voyage of the two greatest seafarers of the Elizabethan age. Hawkins died aboard his ship
The Garland
, off Puerto Rico in the late autumn of 1595. He was followed not long afterwards by Drake as he ‘yielded up his spirit like a Christian to his creator quietly in his cabin',
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aboard his ship
The Defiance
, anchored near Nombre de Dios off the isthmus of Panama – ‘amidst a lament of trumpets and the thunder of the guns, the sea received her own again'.
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Drake passed away in the early hours of 28 January 1596 and was buried at sea in a lead coffin off the small harbour of Portobello. He was fifty-one and by then looked an old man.

Drake was one of the great English folk heroes whose fame was to spread on an international scale, an archetypal man of the people who emerged from obscurity by virtue of his own endeavours to become a person of substance in Elizabethan society. He was the most dazzling of the Queen's seafarers, though he had a darker side, lacking the nobler qualities of his colleagues. There is no necessity for a supreme seaman to be a saint – Nelson certainly was not. Furthermore there is the problem of judging events of some four hundred years ago from a less religious, but paradoxically more moral and humane age in western Europe.

Not surprisingly, when the news of Sir Francis Drake's death reached Spain, it was greeted with wild enthusiasm. Lope de Vega, who had survived the ill-fated Armada expedition in 1588 to become one of Spain's leading dramatists, composed a triumphant poem,
La Dragontea
. In England, the reaction from both Queen and country to the passing of the nation's two most famous seafarers was understandably more muted. It had been a low-key ending for the pair who had caused so much mayhem during their lifetime. The attack on Panama had cost both Hawkins and Drake their lives, as well as costing the Queen a considerable amount of money – she had invested heavily in the expedition. It was impossible to comprehend which she mourned the most. Perhaps in her eyes they had served their purpose and were now expendable.

Drake's success had been achieved by his incomparable skill as a seafarer, his ruthless opportunism and more than his fair share of good fortune. The same could not, however, be said about another of the illustrious seafaring heroes of the Elizabethan era, Sir Richard Grenville. Despite an undoubted ability as a seaman coupled with a fierce determination to succeed, Grenville invariably seemed doomed to lurk in Drake's shadow, Grenville contemptuously regarded Drake as both a braggart and an upstart, simply not in his class, either socially or as a seafarer. The Grenville family collectively appeared to be unlucky – Sir Richard's grandfather was captured by Cornish rebels protesting against Henry's break with Rome and thrown into a cell at Launceston Castle. Sir Richard's father, Roger, had been drowned at sea when, as captain of the
Mary Rose
in 1545, he had gone down with almost all hands as Henry VIII's flagship had foundered in the Solent off Portsmouth before the horrified sovereign's eyes. It was Sir Richard in 1574 who had first devised the scheme for the voyage to the southern ocean which eventually led to Drake's circumnavigation of the globe. Unfortunately, Sir Richard had approached the Queen during one of the periodic moments in time when she did not wish to antagonize Spain, and his plan was rejected as being far too provocative. When the enterprise was revived by Drake, Elizabeth was in a more aggressive mood towards the Spanish, so the adventure was entrusted to Drake instead of Grenville. Timing is all.

Drake had prospered enormously from the voyage and was able to purchase Buckland Abbey in the winter of 1580 from an impecunious Grenville, who was forced to sell the property that Henry VIII had originally given to his grandfather subsequent to the dissolution of the monasteries. It was galling for Sir Richard that the purchaser was his arch-rival Drake, by then knighted by the Queen and wealthy – and in Grenville's eyes more puffed up and insufferable than ever before. To Grenville's understandably jaundiced view there was simply no justice in life. His fortunes only worsened further. First, Drake rescued the demoralized settlers that Sir Richard had taken to Virginia in 1585 in partnership with Sir Walter Ralegh in order to set up a colony in the New World. Two years later, when the English fleet assembled in order to meet the Armada in 1588, both Grenville and Ralegh were dispatched for duties elsewhere and were unable to take part in the famous victory or share in the glory of one of the most celebrated triumphs in the history of maritime warfare. Elizabeth's image-conscious seafarers were desperately anxious to be in the centre of the action and to be seen performing heroic deeds. When after an exciting close-quarter encounter with the Armada, the commander of the English fleet returned Lord Henry Seymour to the humdrum task of patrolling the Straits of Dover, Seymour was furious and promptly sent a dispatch to the Queen signed sarcastically, ‘Your Majesty's most bounden and faithful fisherman'.
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Sir Richard Grenville had originally come from an old aristocratic family and undergone legal training at the Inner Temple in London before becoming a Member of Parliament. Always hankering after action and glory, he had fought with distinction in both Hungary and Ireland. Grenville was incredibly brave to an almost suicidal degree, mercurial, explosive. Like Drake, he was wholly unscrupulous when it came to the pursuit of his own interest, but similar to Hawkins in that he was totally loyal to his sovereign, Elizabeth. Grenville would go to ridiculous lengths to enhance his macho image: one of his favourite party tricks was to eat wine glasses at the dinner table, chewing and devouring the splinters while the blood dripped out of his mouth before horrified and bemused fellow diners. Throughout his lifetime Grenville always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and this trait proved his ultimate downfall. In 1591, his ship
The Revenge
, which he had inherited from Drake, became isolated from the English fleet and surrounded by a large group of Spanish warships under Martin de Bertendona, who had commanded the Levant squadron at the time of the Armada. Bertendona's ships were part of Philip of Spain's newly built fleet which included twelve huge galleons symbolically named after the twelve apostles.

Despite being hopelessly outnumbered, Grenville predictably yet stupidly elected to stand and fight rather than beat a discreet retreat. He then engaged the Spaniards for more than twelve hours in one of those heroic yet pointless encounters which, like the Charge of the Light Brigade, the British are prone to involve themselves in from time to time. Fighting went on throughout the night, during which time two large Spanish warships were sunk and two more very seriously damaged. By dawn Grenville had exhausted his powder and shot and
The Revenge
lay at the enemy's mercy, while, ‘round her in a silent ring lay the Spanish ships scored with the marks of her teeth'.
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As Grenville lay helpless and dying, his decimated and exhausted crew surrendered to the Spanish. ‘Here die I Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind; for I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queen, religion and honour, whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier.'
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Grenville, the most unlucky of Elizabeth's seafarers, must be one of the few people to have composed their own epitaph on their deathbed. He had finally achieved the everlasting recognition he so desperately desired.
The Revenge
sank shortly afterwards along with more than a dozen Spanish ships in a sudden violent gale off the Azores.

Thomas Fenner was another Elizabethan seafarer to be caught alone by a superior force yet managed to fight them off. His encounter with a much larger Portuguese squadron was also off the Azores and his survival was secured by superior seamanship and gunnery. Fenner often sailed with Drake, accompanying him on the epic West Indian raid in 1585, taking part in the assault on Cadiz in 1587 and Drake's Azores expedition in 1589 when he was Vice-Admiral. Fenner had commanded the 500-ton warship
The Nonpareil
against the Armada the previous year.

Martin Frobisher had also accompanied Drake on his frequent assaults on Spanish ports and shipping, being his second-in-command during the 1585 West Indian campaign. Frobisher was to spend a great deal of time and money in a vain attempt to discover an alternative route to China via the Northwest Passage. He was wholly unsuccessful and the Queen eventually lost patience with him, having originally been an enthusiastic backer of his pioneering efforts. Frobisher was an extremely accomplished navigator, in spite of being virtually illiterate and barely able to write his name. He captained
Triumph
against the Armada, the largest English warship, well over 1,000 tons, equivalent to any vessel in the Spanish fleet. Along with Drake and Hawkins, he commanded one of the individual squadrons which Howard, the English fleet commander, had formed during the second half of the encounter with the Armada and was always in the thick of the fighting, thoroughly deserving the knighthood awarded to him during the battle: ‘For hee had valiantly and discreetly behaved himselfe.'
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Walter Ralegh's fame as a seafarer is largely illusory. Unlike Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher and Fenner, he was essentially an amateur sailor in a part-time capacity, unable to make up his mind whether he was a courtier, warrior, suitor or even a poet. In most matters concerning Ralegh, there was inevitably a noticeable credibility gap between aspiration and achievement. His one true moment of glory came as joint commander with the Earl of Essex in the attack on Cadiz in 1597, yet even then Essex took most of the credit for the limited success achieved.

William Borrough, Edward Fenton and John Davis, together with members of the nobility such as the Earl of Cumberland, Lord Thomas Howard, Lord Sheffield and Lord Henry Seymour, were also part of the distinguished company of seafarers who served the Queen so well during her many years on the throne and became her swordsmen in the time of war. Earlier in her life, men like Richard Chancellor, Hugh Willoughby and Anthony Jenkinson distinguished themselves in voyages of exploration. Chancellor sailed so far that he ‘came at last to the place where hee found no night at all, but a continuall light and brightnesse of the sunne shining clearly upon the huge and mightie sea.'
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By the time of the crucial encounter with the Armada, the key seafarers in the English fleet, men such as Drake, Hawkins, Frobisher and Fenner, were in their prime, whereas the veteran Spanish commander, Don Alvara de Bazan, the Marquis of Santa Cruz, a man who had possessed a formidable seafaring reputation, had recently died, ‘that light of war, the father of these soldiers, that valiant and unconquered leader'.
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Santa Cruz left no obvious replacement, and his second-in-command, Juan Martinez de Recalde, was in his sixties and suffering from very poor health. This was to have a very significant effect when battle commenced.

The English fleet commander, Lord Charles Howard of Effingham, has always been conceivably one of the most underrated of Elizabeth's seafarers, so much so that the Spanish had assumed that Drake was really in command and Howard purely a figurehead. This was certainly not the case as the Lord Admiral was always firmly in control, and at all times made the crucial combat decisions. Howard's qualities as a leader of men in times of war could be compared with Eisenhower, that highly successful Supreme Allied Commander-in-Chief in the later stages of the Second World War. Like Eisenhower, Howard was a perfect conduit between anxious politicians in London and the fighting force under his command. Howard had the ability to get the best out of seafaring prima donnas such as Drake and Frobisher who had crucial roles in his fleet, massaging their egos whenever necessary, swiftly settling disputes and directing his volatile commanders against the enemy rather than each other.