“We do account that he which striketh at thee, Drake, striketh at us.”
And he could have expected nothing less. He was the appointed leader and had just those powers which appertain to leadership and always have since one man led and others followed.
Drake’s answer, however — we must admit it, if we admit John Cooke’s version — was not one of his best efforts.
“Well, you shall not see it,” he said bluntly, “but well, my masters, this fellow is full of prating. Bind me his arms, for I will be safe of my life;” and whilst Thomas Hood and Gregory were binding him, Drake accused him of lying that he had first made him acquainted with the Earl of Essex in Ireland, and then charged him with poisoning that chivalrous but unfortunate nobleman.
However, in a little while he simmered down, a jury of forty jurymen with John Winter, Captain of the Elizabeth, as foreman, was appointed, and John Thomas the clerk read aloud the articles of arraignment containing those statements and claims of Doughty and those efforts to suborn members of the crews of the various ships which have been allotted to their time and place on the voyage of the fleet from Cape Verde to the coast of Brazil.
These charges did not seriously disturb the prisoner. They were “words of unkindness” which anger might excuse. He hardly indeed troubled to deny them. But it was another story when “at length came in one Edward Bright.”
We know little of Ned Bright, but clearly John Cooke knew less. “Edward Bright whose honestie of life I have not to deal with,” he writes. But one can be confident that he would have dealt with it very thoroughly, had he been in possession of the necessary material. Ned Bright, at some time between the end of this trial and the fleet’s exodus from the western mouth of the straits, became Master of the Marigold, and went down with his ship and its crew of twenty-eight in the great gale of September 1578. Mr. Fletcher, the chaplain, wrote in the margin of his narrative: “Marked judgment against a false witness.” But Mr. Fletcher was free with his indications of Divine wrath. For according to him, when that tempest was succeeded by a calm so complete that there was not enough wind to shake a silken thread, John Brewer, sounding his trumpet on the poop, was hurled by the swing of a loose rope into the water; and to so miraculous a distance from the ship that he was only recovered when he had come to the end of all hope. “His judgement worth noteing.” So runs Mr. Fletcher’s annotation in the margin, and one may speculate whether that devout man did not look upon his own subsequent disgrace and punishment as a similar judgment upon himself. For he too was amongst the witnesses who gave evidence at this trial against Doughty.
The fatal testimony, however, was brought forward by Ned Bright in the account which he gave of the conversation Doughty had had with him, partly in Drake’s garden in Plymouth when the Pelican and the Marigold were under repair and partly upon the Pelican. Ned Bright seems to have stepped forward smartly.
“Nay, Doughty, we have other matter for you yet that will a little nearer touch you. It will, i’faith, bite you to the quick.”
Doughty answered with dignity and restraint.
“I pray thee, Ned Bright, charge me with nothing but the truth and spare me not.”
And so John Thomas read out the last article of the indictment. It was Thomas Doughty who first brought Francis Drake into a relation with the Earl of Essex and got for him the Queen’s pay after he had fled from the Lord Admiral and the Council. It was Thomas Doughty who introduced Francis Drake to Mr. Christopher Hatton, Captain of the Guard and Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, after Essex had died. It was Thomas Doughty who proposed to venture a thousand pounds in this expedition and make it a joint enterprise between the two of them.
This, to be sure, was old talk with which he had made every one of the ships he had sailed in familiar. But now came something new. Thomas Doughty had been thinking, and by the time when Drake came to him in the Temple and claimed the fulfilment of his promise he had changed his mind. He had decided that so important a voyage was more meet for a prince than a subject. He had gone off, therefore, at once to Mr. Secretary Walsingham and Christopher Hatton and, like a true subject, had exposed the matter to them. They in their turn had exposed it to the Queen’s Majesty, who took a good liking to it and sent for Drake. To Drake she gave the order that the enterprise should go forward, but she joined Doughty with him in as large a commission as ever went out of England. And because Doughty had served her so faithfully in Ireland under the Earl of Essex, the whole transaction was recorded under the hand and seal of the said Thomas Doughty.
Such a record, of course, never existed, and there is not the least evidence that Doughty was at any time presented to Queen Elizabeth, but no doubt he imagined that this story would serve as well as another for a simple sailorman like Bright. He rode off thereupon on his old brag that he would do a great deal of good to a great many men. Twelve was the number he selected. Yes, twelve “should carry the bell away,” and Ned Bright, if he would only be ruled by Doughty — like Chester and Cuttill and the rest of them — would become richer than any of his kindred. This promise Doughty repeated in Bright’s cabin on the Pelican, and on the Portuguese prize he added a fine new flourish which brought his head closer to the block than it had been before. For he expressed his regret that he had not taken on the adventure without Drake’s assistance. He could have done it very well, and whatever trouble they found when they reached home, he could have settled it. For the whole Council could be corrupted with money — yea, even the Queen’s Majesty herself.
This statement, Ned Bright declared, it grieved his conscience to hear, and upon this jury of forty, all sailormen and the most of them from the western seaboard, the effect must have been devastating. This was the year 1578. Queen Elizabeth had been twenty years upon the throne. She had raised her country out of humiliation and penury. She had kept her great nobles in their place. She had created the great middle class, fostered trade, and thrown her ample cloak over those great privateers like Hawkins and Drake who broke through the barriers set up by Spain and sought their fortunes with their own strong hands. She had put an end to religious persecution, she had made an England which was wooed perhaps, threatened perhaps, but never neglected. And she was known to her subjects. Those great “progresses” which she made through the summer months with a laugh and a ready word for the crowds which lined the roads had lifted her high in the hearts of the common people. She was Gloriana to the poets and the courtiers, an ethereal figure clothed in the embroideries of romance, but to the farmers and shopkeepers and sailors she was the greatest of Englishwomen, at once one of themselves and their great mistress. A slur upon her was a slur upon them.
Doughty had an answer.
“Why, Ned Bright, what should move thee thus to belie me? Thou knowest that such familiarity was never between thee and me,” and there he should have been content. Between a ship’s carpenter and Thomas Doughty there was, after all, a sufficient distance to make the conversation improbable from beginning to end. But he must go on himself to abolish the distance. For he added:
“But it may be I said if we brought home gold we should be the better welcome, but yet that is more than I do remember.”
He admitted the conversation and went on to make his position still more dangerous for himself by declaring that the Lord Treasurer Burghley had a plan of the voyage. It will be remembered that Elizabeth herself had insisted in her interview with Drake that not a hint of their purpose should be given to Burghley, lest he should at once set himself to stop it. The acknowledged aim was trade at Alexandria.
“No, that he has not,” cried Drake.
“He has,” Doughty insisted.
“How?” asked Drake.
“He had it from me,” quoth Doughty, and Drake, according to John Cooke, seized upon the admission. “So this was a special article against him to cut his throat and greatly he (Drake) seemed to rejoice at this advantage.”
“Lo, my masters, what this fellow hath done! God will have his treacheries
all known, for Her Majesty gave me special commandment that of all men my Lord Treasurer should not know it. His own mouth hath betrayed him.”
Thomas, however, stood stiff and straight to this attack. He saw now, even if he had been blind before, on how shaky a pinnacle his foot was placed. But he held to his statement. If he was allowed by Drake to live and answer his accusers in England, he would sign it. But according to Drake, or rather to John Cooke’s Drake, that was a matter to be debated later. The first step was to get the verdict of the jury whether Doughty was guilty or no.
At this point, Leonard Vicary, one of the gentlemen and a staunch friend of the Doughtys, interrupted the proceedings. He was a member of the jury and he cried out from his place: “General, this is not law nor agreeable to justice that you offer.”
The General turned upon him. The contempt of sea-captains for the ornaments of the law seems to have been a tradition as conventional then as it is today.
“I have not to do with you crafty lawyers, neither care I for the law. But I know what I will do.”
John Thomas thereupon administered the oath to the members of the jury and handed them the articles of indictment. Leonard Vicary, however, was not come to the end of his objections, and there followed a scene which, curiously enough, had a parallel in a murder trial at the Old Bailey a few years ago.
“I know not how we may answer his life,” said Vicary, meaning how we may answer and ensure that he may live.
“Well, Master Vicary,” came the reply from the judgment seat, “you shall not have to do with his life. Let me alone with that. You are but to see whether he be guilty or no.”
“Why, very well,” Vicary returned, and there the parallel ends, for Vicary added:
“Then there is, I trust, no matter of death?”
“No, no, Master Vicary,” Drake replied, but whether by these words he was agreeing with or contradicting Vicary remains in doubt.
The jury, accordingly, put its separate heads together, and found Doughty guilty upon all the indictments, but not without discussion. It was questioned whether Ned Bright was a sufficient man for another man’s life to depend upon his word. If he had been honest, would he not have exposed all the treachery talked to him in the Plymouth garden before he left England? Would he have waited until he had reached a spot where will took the place of law and reason was in exile? That this doubt had been debated was told to Drake when the verdict was handed in, but he swept it aside.
“Why, I dare to swear that what Ned Bright has said is very true,” he said, and leaving Thomas Doughty and his brother in custody, he led the rest of his company down to the water’s edge, and there showed them letters which he had in a bundle, one from the Earl of Essex to Walsingham commending Drake to his notice, one from Christopher Hatton bidding him take John Thomas and John Brewer upon the voyage and use them well, and one proving Her Majesty’s stake in the adventure. He then made a speech arguing that, once his credit had been destroyed, his life would have followed upon his credit, and then what would have become of them? They would have been reduced to drinking each other’s blood before they saw their own country again. Whereas now, if such a voyage as this which had never before been made out of England went forward to its end, there wasn’t a cabin-boy who wouldn’t become a gentleman. But it couldn’t possibly go forward if Doughty lived, and the simplest amongst them could understand what a reproach to their country as well as to them failure would be. Thereupon Drake called for a show of hands. Those who thought Doughty’s guilt deserved death were to hold them up.
It is not known whether there were any present who voted against the death-sentence. But from John Cooke’s silence upon that point it can be inferred reasonably that there were none. The inference is strengthened by the narrator’s curious assignment of motives for those who did hold their hands up. Some were inspired by envy of Doughty’s high “felicity,” some by fear of what Drake would do to them if they did not, and some — can one imagine an author harder put to it to explain the actions of his characters? — some lifted their hands in a mute prayer to the Lord to deliver them from the cruel tyranny of Drake! Not one, apparently, gave a genuine verdict.
Drake, then, returning to the seat of judgment, pronounced sentence of death. Statements differ as to how the sentence was put to the culprit and how it was received. “The World Encompassed” relates that Drake offered to Doughty a choice between three procedures. He could be executed on the island, or he could be put ashore on the mainland, or he could return to England, there to answer for his deeds before the Lords of Her Majesty’s Council. Doughty, after a time for reflection, replied that if he was put ashore to live amongst savage infidels he would imperil his soul, so great was his frailty and so mighty the contagion of lewd custom; that as for returning to England, he had no ship nor crew nor provisions, and, if he had, the shame of the return would be worse than death; that therefore he would die upon the island, if the General would grant him the favour of a gentleman’s death and receive the Holy Communion with him before it.
John Cooke sees in this occasion a hypocritical performance by Drake and little else. Drake professed to be anxious to spare Doughty’s life. If anybody between then and the next day could find a safe means of doing so, he would gladly hear him. He begged Doughty himself to devise one. Thereupon Doughty proposed that Drake should carry him along to Peru and set him ashore in that country. But Drake shook his head.
“No, truly, Master Doughty, I cannot answer it to Her Majesty if I should do so.”...And yet if anyone would guarantee his safety from Doughty’s hands — and he turned to Winter, the Captain of the Elizabeth. Winter answered at once that if Doughty was committed to his custody he would guarantee the General’s safety. The answer put the General in a quandary.
“So then, my masters,” he said, after a little pausing, “we must nail him close under the hatches and return home without making any voyage.”
But the company would have none of such a solution of their difficulty— “a company of desperate bankrupts that could not live in their country without the spoil of that as others had gotten by the sweat of their brows.” Thus John Cooke describes his brother sailors. They cried “God forbid,” and Drake listened very attentively to that cry, “for there needed no spur to a willing horse.” So, willing Doughty to prepare for death after the respite of a day, he rose and closed the court.
Thus ended the famous trial which has caused so much vexation to the admirers of a great agent in England’s ascension, and to his detractors so much content. It is possible, no doubt, that in an established Court of Justice, with lively advocates to seize upon a careless word and strict interpretations to exclude all but evidence sharpened to a point, Doughty might have escaped. But the most partial account written by Drake’s open enemy, while praising Doughty to the skies, still makes it clear that he was plotting mutiny; and mutiny is the greatest crime committed on the sea. Long ocean passages in the tropics, with a trade-wind astern and for weeks on end hardly a rope to be shifted from its cleat, were the breeding-ground of plots and imagined grievances, and if we coloured our charts to show where murder had destroyed a ship and its crew, the red patches in the Caribbean and the Pacific would come near to rivalling the islands in their number. It was upon Edward Bright’s evidence that Doughty was condemned — Edward Bright “whose honestie of life I have not to deal with,” writes John Cooke, and could there be an innuendo more slimy? But Edward Bright’s evidence of the conversation in Drake’s garden at Plymouth was corroborated over and over again by the witnesses of the fine talk which Doughty gave mouth to in the flyboat and on the Pelican.
How should Ned Bright, a ship’s carpenter, have all this knowledge of the tug-of-war between Walsingham and Burghley, of the influence of Christopher Hatton with the Queen, of the Lord Admiral and the Council, unless Doughty had given it to him? Drake’s enemies, to be sure, had another explanation. Drake, the cunning fellow, had coached him, as he had tried to coach Thomas Cuttill, who h
ad taken himself off to the mainland with his musket to live amongst the cannibals rather than bear false witness. Indeed, the picture and image of the great General which the friends of Doughty must needs set up if their story were to be believed, is perhaps its clearest confutation. He is made out a malicious rampageous tyrant, with a false heartiness; moved by jealousy to spill the honest blood of as good a friend as man could wish for; and so stark a terror to his shipmates that they must bear witness as he bade them whilst they prayed God to deliver them from his cruelty. But that picture is quite irreconcilable with the Drake of Nombre de Dios whose sailors left the Treasure House unrifled rather than risk their General’s life, the Drake who insisted upon sharing the dangers of the journey on the raft, and who when failure trod upon failure remained the inspiration which kept up their hearts.
Drake was thirty-four or thereabouts in 1578. For many years he had been learning, and there is no sign but in these doubtful accusations that he ever went back upon his learning. He had been equipping character and mind for the politic conduct of great expeditions. The overweening vanity which destroyed Magellan and the barbarism which besmirched Sir Richard Grenville were alien from him. Severe upon occasions he must be, discipline he must have, if he was to clip the talons of the Spaniard, enrich himself and his sailors, and bring his ships safely home to the Glory of God, of England and his Queen.
CHAPTER IX
THE FIRST CHARTER FOR THE MARINER
THE CIRCUMSTANCES OF Doughty’s death are a mirror of the times. Such a jumble of marvellous things was happening at home that one could hardly sort them out. Great trading corporations like the Levant Company, the flight of Mary Stuart to England and her imprisonment there, the growing power of the Queen, the many expeditions which struck out across the oceans like the spokes of a wheel, the chastisement of this or that great nobleman of the North, the ring of hammers in the shipyards, the introduction of the hot spices from the Moluccas, the plots and intrigues — how should one keep pace with them? Abroad, the curtain was being rolled up on so many fabulous new worlds and so many fantastic creatures, from the giants of Patagonia to the soft-footed men with the slanting eyes of Cathay, that nothing which one could imagine seemed any longer outside nature. To the people of the Elizabethan age, who were at once spectators, scene-shifters and actors of this endless transformation scene, their own violent incongruities must have seemed the merest commonplace. Thus the accounts of Thomas Doughty’s execution are written in the simplest tranquil style, as if that was just the sort of way in which one would naturally expect an execution at Port Saint Julian to be conducted.
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 868