He had nothing left to prove. Withdrawing to the West Country, where he was better appreciated than he was at court, he shrewdly invested some of his money in rentable property in Plymouth. He bought a country estate, Buckland Abbey in Devonshire, designed himself a coat of arms, and settled down to enjoy his success. He became mayor of Plymouth and a member of Parliament. When his first wife died, he married again, this time into the gentry. He grew fat, and had himself painted by Nicholas Hilliard and Marcus Gheeraerts. He was to describe himself in verse as one “who seeks by gain and wealth to advance his house and blood.” He had achieved his objective.
He was not left to enjoy his retirement. In 1585 Philip II ordered that all English ships in Spanish ports should be seized. Elizabeth retaliated by giving Drake a commission—that seal of royal approval he had so signally lacked for his circumnavigation—as admiral of a wide-ranging aggressive raid on Spanish ports in Europe and America. With an army of some 2,300 men to be commanded on land by Walsingham’s son-in-law, Christopher Carleill, with Martin Frobisher as his vice admiral and with over twenty-five ships, he appeared in a new role, no longer the quick-witted pirate and adventurer making a mock of the forces massed against him, but now himself master of an imposing fleet.
It was not a role in which he was entirely happy. In each of his subsequent campaigns he was to have serious disputes with one or more of his senior officers. As he had told the jury trying Sir Thomas Doughty on the beach at Port San Julian, “I know what I will do,” and he didn’t like to be hampered in the doing of it by doubts and questions. “Sir Francis was a willing hearer of every man’s opinion, but commonly a follower of his own,” wrote Robert Mansell. Some of his colleagues and subordinate officers found that hard to bear. He wanted them to be his own men, as the men on the Golden Hind—officers and crew alike—had been after Port San Julian. In 1585 he demanded that all the officers take an oath of loyalty to him, an unnecessary measure which by offending their pride came close to provoking a mutiny.
In Santiago, in the Cape Verde Islands, and in the Caribbean though, Carleill and Drake worked well together, assaulting, sacking, and looting towns, raising money as the Cid had done, by burning houses and destroying crops until paid to go away. Financially the expedition was a failure. The Spanish settlers were terrorized into giving Drake all they had, but it wasn’t as much as he had hoped. The investors got back only 75 percent of their stakes. Drake himself lost all the money he had put up. In human terms the losses were terrible: nearly a third of the men in the English fleet died of yellow fever. But the effect on morale, both English and Spanish, was electric. As Drake rampaged through the Caribbean rumors spread throughout Europe: he had released 12,000 black slaves, he had captured twenty-six ships, he had laid waste every city on the Spanish Main. The truth was less impressive, but the fictions had their effect. The legend of Drake’s astonishing audacity and luck spread far and wide, high and low. While Spanish seamen began to believe him a wizard, perhaps even a devil, and told stories about the familiar spirit with whom he communed, the pope himself wrote, “God alone knows what he may succeed in doing!” “Truly,” wrote Burghley, “Sir Francis Drake is a fearful man to the King of Spain.”
It was partly in response to this outrageous terrorism that King Philip resolved to order an assault on England, and to assemble the Armada that was to accomplish it. Elizabeth responded. Early in 1587 Mary, Queen of Scots, focus over the previous years of numerous Spanish-sponsored plots, was beheaded. In March Drake was commissioned to attack the Spanish fleet in the ports where it was gathering. In both cases Elizabeth, either really vacillating or deviously covering herself, subsequently disowned her own decisions. She signed Mary’s death warrant but afterwards claimed it had been acted upon too precipitately and against her wishes. Just after Drake’s fleet left Plymouth a pinnace was sent after him carrying new orders from the queen forbidding him “to enter forcibly into any of the said King’s [Philip’s] ports or havens, or to offer violence to any of his towns or shipping within harbour.” Of all his actions the one for which England’s other favorite sailor, Horatio Nelson, is most widely remembered is the apocryphal one of his holding his telescope to his blind eye so that he would not see the signal to withdraw from battle. Drake, too, made sure an unwelcome order should not reach him. Perhaps he set sail early deliberately in order to avoid receiving it. Or perhaps (for she was as wily as he) the queen never intended that it should reach him in time.
Late one afternoon just over two weeks later Drake arrived off Cádiz, his fleet trailing behind him. Sir Robert Mansell, writing in 1625, described him as “being of a lively spirit, resolute, quick and sufficiently valiant.” In this raid he was at his happy best. The wind was with him. Ignoring the anxiety of his vice admiral, William Borough, who wanted to wait until the stragglers had caught them up and to call a captain’s conference before undertaking any action, Drake sailed straight into the harbor “with more speed and arrogance,” according to a Spanish customs officer who was there, “than any pirate has ever shown.” There were at least sixty ships in the harbor, and the place was virtually undefended, the Spanish, according to one of them, having such “confidence that no enemy would dare to enter the bay … nor had it been heard in many centuries previous of any having such daring to break through the entrances of their port.” Like the fast runner Achilles, like Alcibiades in the Hellespont, like the devil that the Spanish were beginning to believe that he was, Drake appeared where no one had ever dreamed he might possibly be. Two galleys rowed out to meet him, but fled as soon as the English ships fired at them. Onshore the terrified townspeople stampeded into the castle; twenty-two of them were killed in the crush. All that night and all the next day Drake was in the harbor, looting and burning ship after ship. The pitch and tar with which the ships were coated burned tremendously: “smoke and flames rose up so that it seemed like a huge volcano, or something out of Hell,” wrote a Spanish eyewitness. The city filled up with Spanish troops, but there was nothing they dared to do. The English ships were out of reach of the guns onshore. Somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-nine ships (Spanish estimates tend to be lower than English ones) were destroyed or captured while the Spaniards watched helplessly from the shore. All the while Borough kept begging Drake to withdraw, pointing out that without a favorable wind they might all find themselves trapped. Eventually, without Drake’s permission, he sailed his own ship back out to sea. But Drake continued implacable, unflappable, serenely relying on his luck to get him out when he had finished his work of destruction.
On the evening of the second day, with a great noise of trumpets, Drake prepared to leave. That was when the wind dropped, just as the timorous Borough had predicted it might. Drake hung on, and so did his luck. In the small hours of the following morning he found enough breeze to lead his ships out through the narrow mouth of the harbor “as well,” according to a Spanish witness, “as the most experienced local pilot.”
The Spaniards tried valiantly to spin the story into the appearance of a Spanish victory. They celebrated a great mass to thank God for having saved the city and “humbled the pride of the enemy,” and Fray Pedro Simon wrote a triumphant report claiming that the English had lost many ships and men. “Thus were the thresholds of the gate of Spain watered with the blood of these wolves, in order that the scent might keep their fellows away from our doors.” As propaganda for domestic consumption it may have worked, but the international community was not duped. “Just look at Drake!” exclaimed the Pope. “Who is he? What forces does he have? And yet he burned twenty five of the king’s ships! … We are sorry to say it, but we have a poor opinion of this Spanish Armada, and fear some disaster.” Before it had even fully come into existence, the Armada’s credibility was already being undermined by the potency of Drake’s ever-increasing fame.
Sailing southward to Cape St. Vincent Drake stormed and took the castle at Sagres and permitted his men to ransack the monastery there, destroying images and burning
the buildings. A Spanish official reported that they “committed their usual feasts and drunkenness, their diabolical rampages and obscenities.” Using Sagres as his base he proceeded to harass all the supply ships passing along the southern coast of Spain, bringing provisions for the nascent Armada. Queen Elizabeth’s agent reported that he seized and burnt forty-seven supply ships and between fifty and sixty fishing boats. The operation was not only brilliant but useful. Drake deprived the Armada of vast quantities of essential materials, some of which, most importantly the timber staves for making water barrels, they were never able to replace. Soldiers on their way to join the army assembling in Lisbon had to make their way overland. “The English are masters of the sea,” wrote the Venetian ambassador to Madrid. “Lisbon and the whole coast is, as it were, blockaded.” Strategically Drake’s expedition was a triumph, but financially it was disappointing. Tuna fish and barrel staves do not constitute valuable plunder, and even in this time of national emergency the expedition’s backers, including not only Drake himself but also the queen, wanted a profit. When news came that there were treasure ships approaching the Azores, Drake abandoned his blockade and set off in search of a prize.
In the Azores he encountered a Portuguese carrack, a huge and hugely valuable ship. Her crew put up a more determined defense than any of Drake’s previous prey, but she was outnumbered; eventually the English took possession of her and of her fabulous cargo of spices, silk, ebony, jewels, gold, and silver. She was almost as great a prize as the Cacafuego had been, although, since it had taken a fleet rather than a single little ship to capture her, the profits this time were not so prodigious. The expedition’s commercial success was assured. So, as it happened, was the temporary frustration of Spanish war plans. King Philip, alarmed by Drake’s disappearance and fearful of what he might be doing out in the Atlantic, ordered the Spanish fleet to pursue him. For three wasted months they hunted him in vain, returning with men so exhausted and sick and ships so weatherbeaten that the planned attack on England had to be postponed until the following year.
Drake returned to honor and riches. There was no question this time of returning the plunder. It took seventeen ships to carry the San Felipe’s fabulous cargo from Plymouth to London, Drake having first personally delivered to the queen a chest packed full of priceless golden trinkets—knives, forks, pomanders, rings, and every kind of jewel. It appears that, despite what Burghley was telling the Spanish ambassador about his queen’s grave displeasure at Drake’s aggressive actions, she accepted the gifts with enthusiasm. Drake himself was permitted to keep £20,000, an even greater fortune than the one he already had.
His reputation was at its zenith. He was bold and brilliant and, best of all, he was successful. It seemed to his countrymen that there was nothing he couldn’t do. He was just the champion England needed, and the need was urgent. England was about to face a danger as appalling as those which had persuaded the Athenians to recall Alcibiades and the king of Castile to plead for the services of the banished Cid. The Spanish assault on England had been hampered and hindered, but it had not been stopped. In July of 1588 the great Armada finally set sail, some 125 ships carrying 30,000 men. John Hawkins called it “the greatest and strongest combination, to my understanding, that ever was gathered in Christendom,” and it was advancing on England with the manifest intention of invading the country and subjecting the English people to the kind of horrors, the whip, the torture, the stake, which—as every English person had had dinned into them by the Protestant authorities—had already been inflicted upon the peoples of Spanish America.
The story of the defeat of the Spanish Armada, as it took shape almost immediately in the English popular imagination, is the story of a mighty empire defeated by a tiny island; of the representatives of authoritarianism mocked by the defenders of liberty; of an archaic, conservative power, throttled by its own pride, outpaced by a creative, energetic, progressive race of unconventional improvisers. It is at the heart of this story that Francis Drake, the daylight robber, the irreverent captain who singed a king’s beard, appears to best effect, as the personification of all that was bold and dashing about Elizabethan England. The image which encapsulates that story, an image which is almost entirely false, is that of the huge, lumbering, incongruously magnificent Armada taunted and goaded by a gnat-swarm of tiny nimble ships.
That image began to circulate almost immediately. Thomas Nash wrote about the Spanish fleet “like a high wood, that overshadowed the shrubs of our low ships,” and Camden, who had access to several participants in the campaign, described the Spanish ships as being so huge “the winds grew tired of carrying them” and the ocean groaned under their weight, while the English ships were “far the lesser.” The image of this unequal conflict took firm root in the popular imagination. In one of the folk stories Southey collected in the 1820s, Drake, on receiving news of the Armada’s approach, took a piece of wood and insouciantly began to whittle it. His wood shavings, flying off, fell into the sea and each one became a ship. Drake with his wood chips nicely confounds expectation by defeating an opponent much larger, much better equipped, and far more pompous than himself. And Drake the wizard, conjuring ships from nowhere, is a reminder of the widespread belief that the English success against the Armada was a kind of miracle, given the odds against it, something which could only have been contrived by magic, or the extraordinary pluck and audacity of hero born, like Rodrigo Díaz, in a happy hour.
In fact the English had the technological advantage. The stupendous strength and mass of the Armada is a part of legend as well as of history. What is less well-known is that the English fleet assembled to meet it was half as large again. If any single Englishman can claim credit for the Armada’s failure, it was Drake’s old employer John Hawkins. Like Drake, Hawkins had exchanged piracy for public service and had been since 1578 treasurer of the queen’s navy, in which capacity he had overseen the construction of what were, by general agreement, the best fighting ships in the world. The Spanish ships were transporting an invading army, and were designed as troop-carriers-cum-fortresses. The English ships, built for action, had none of the massive superstructures which made the Spanish galleons loom so tall. But though they were lower they were not smaller. The average tonnage of the English ships was rather greater than that of the Spanish and there was not a single vessel in the Armada as big as Martin Frobisher’s 1,100-ton Triumph. The English were also ferociously well armed: when the Revenge, which was Drake’s ship for the Armada campaign, was captured at Flores in the Azores three years later it was carrying 70 tons of artillery. The English ships were narrower and far more responsive than those of the Spanish. Medina-Sidonia, the Spanish admiral, described them enviously as “so fast and so nimble they can do anything they like with them.” But they were not wood chips: they were massive, lethal instruments of war.
Drake was not the commander in chief, although nearly all the Spaniards, up to and including Philip II, seem to have believed that he was and the English populace saw him as their prime protector. The English legend of the Armada stresses the rigidly hierarchical nature of Spanish society and contrasts it with the meritocratic openness of Elizabethan England, where a man of the people, like Drake, could rise to the top. In fact both fleets were led (ably as it happens) by noblemen with little seagoing experience who owed their high commands primarily to their social rank, the Spanish Duke of Medina-Sidonia and the English Lord Howard of Effingham. Drake was not a good manager of men. There were people, Elizabeth among them, who remembered Thomas Doughty, and the memory was revived on each of the several occasions when Drake’s high-handedness opened a breach between himself and his associates. In 1585 he had come close to provoking a mutiny by crassly insisting that his officers take an oath of loyalty. In 1587 his vice admiral, Borough, had argued furiously with him at Cádiz, and subsequently allowed himself to be carried home by a mutinous crew. It was not the kind of record to inspire anyone to offer him overall command of the English fleet.
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Before the Armada ever left harbor it was clear to all of its senior commanders that it was bound to fail of its purpose. King Philip’s orders were that it should pass through the Channel in close formation, avoiding battle if possible, and make contact with the Spanish army in the Netherlands under the command of the prince of Parma. It would then, in some way which was never properly defined, help and protect Parma’s troops as they somehow crossed the Straits of Dover to invade England in concert with the soldiers carried on the Armada’s ships. Both Medina-Sidonia and Parma had plainly told Philip that this plan could not possibly be carried out. The Armada’s big ships could not go into the shallow waters off Dunkirk to take off Parma’s men, so the entire Spanish army would have to embark in barges and small boats. In any but the calmest seas they would all be drowned if they managed (as was unlikely) to get past the Dutch, who were patrolling the coastline in shallow-draft vessels and from whom the Armada, standing out to sea, would be unable to protect them.
No solution to these difficulties had been suggested or even, apparently, seriously looked for. Parma wrote gloomily that the success of the Armada “must depend on the holy and mighty will of God, for the zeal and industry of men cannot suffice.” To King Philip that situation appeared, if not exactly ideal, satisfactory enough. He had asked that the invasion attempt should be granted the status of a crusade. The Pope, whose relations with the Spanish king were by no means as harmonious as Spanish propaganda suggested—Philip, in his view, “had no more care for the Catholic religion than a dog”—refused. But there were few in the Spanish fleet who doubted that God was on their side. Catholic Spaniards (and Catholic Englishmen, of whom there were two hundred with the Armada) read of the Catholics martyred under the Protestant Tudor monarchs and deduced that English Protestants were wicked persecutors of the staunch and godly. Medina-Sidonia’s exhortation to his men on setting out declared that “the saints in heaven will go in company with us,” among them Thomas More, Mary, Queen of Scots, and others whom “Elizabeth has torn in pieces with ferocious cruelty and nicely calculated tortures.” They were sailing to England, he told his men, in order to rescue weeping virgins and “tender children, suckled in the poison of heresy, who are doomed to perdition unless deliverance reaches them betimes.” This being so, King Philip felt confident of heavenly assistance. “Since it is all for his cause, God will send good weather,” he told Parma. To Medina-Sidonia he wrote: “This is a matter guided by His Hand and He will help you.” The Armada was launched, as one of its despairing commanders noted, “in the confident hope of a miracle,” a hope which proved forlorn.
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