Complete Works of a E W Mason

by A. E. W. Mason

  There were, besides, two charges of inhumanity and misconduct which kept him, again in Stow’s words, “doubtful of the event.” The unattractive story of the negro-woman far gone with child who was left behind on an uninhabited islet off Celebes was exploited to do him harm. One can hear it going the rounds from the arbours where country gentlemen gossiped after their dinner to the drawing-rooms where ladies chattered over their samplers, ingenuity devising a fresh nastiness here, a new cruelty there. The trial of Doughty came to the fore again, and this time by another voice than that of Parson Fletcher.

  It will be remembered that Zárate, when a captive on the Golden Hind, saw John Doughty dining with himself at the General’s table. During all the time which Zárate spent on board, this youth alone was not allowed to leave the ship. He was to all intents a prisoner, and he brought home a mind black with rage and fury. “The arrantest knave, the vilest villain, the falsest thief and the cruellest murderer that ever was born.” Thus he described the General in writing and in speech. He was not content with either writing or speech. He prosecuted Drake in the Earl Marshal’s Court for the murder of his brother. Drake appealed to the Queen’s Bench to quash the proceedings for want of jurisdiction. The case came before the Lord Chief Justice and other Judges, and it was held that Doughty had a right to proceed — and this was the last that was heard of it. For Doughty was himself arrested for connivance with Zubiaur in a plot to kidnap or assassinate Drake at the instance of the King of Spain, and lay thereafter untried in the Marshalsea prison. But there was talk. Rumour was abroad doing its poisonous work, and the hero of the hour was less quick in his own defence than were his enemies in their attack.

  But the Queen was staunch. Drake was a great sailor. Not even the greatest of his disparagers could touch him there. Stow, who was careful to observe the critical aloofness of an historian, wrote:

  “He was more skilful in all points of navigation than any that ever was before his time, in his time, or since his death. He was also of a perfect memory, great observation by nature, skilful in artillery, expert and apt to let blood and give physic unto his people according to the climates” — readers will remember how quickly the many wounded at the island of La Mocha recovered of their wounds under his care. “His name was a terror to the French, Spaniard, Portugal and Indians; many Princes of Italy, Germany and others as well enemies as friends in his life time desired his picture.” One quality Stow forgot in this sketch — his loyalty. Loyalty to his Queen, to his fellow-sailormen of the Western Ports, to his Protestant religion, to his country. “Mere English!” That had been the Queen’s boast. She had a man at her feet who was mere English too, a sharp sword for her to use and an eager heart which outleapt her desire to use him. She stood by him during this winter, walked with him in her garden, distinguished him amongst all her courtiers. On New Year’s Day she wore the emerald crown which he had given her, and announced that on a day in the spring she would herself visit the Golden Hind and make its General a Knight. And let it be remembered, a knighthood was no small honour in those days. Queen Elizabeth was chary of her titles. Sir Francis Drake, Knight. Walsingham, the great Secretary, was no more to the end of his days.

  On the 4th of April she led a stately procession of Royal barges down the river and went on board Drake’s “weather-beaten bark.” A banquet was served — the finest that had been seen in England since the days of King Henry, Mendoza wrote indignantly — and after it was finished, she knighted Francis Drake with some very odd circumstances in the ceremony. It may have been that she was in a merry humour that day, for she loved a joke, but at the back of her mind there must have been the knowledge that Mendoza’s report of the affair would make unpalatable reading for King Philip. In the course of her long courtship of the Duke of Alençon, the French King’s brother, Elizabeth shifted from position to position with all the latitude and speed allowed to the Queen upon a chess-board. Now she was a poor old creature more fit to be Iris sister than his wife; now she wouldn’t marry him to be the Empress of the whole wide world; now he was her well-beloved frog and she gave him a ring and a kiss. She was in the last mood on the day when she dined on board the Golden Hind. She would marry him, he should be King of the Netherlands, and there should be an alliance between France and England which would give Portugal and her possessions to Don Antonio, and — to use a phrase which she so often used to her statesmen and courtiers when they had angered her — she would set King Philip by the feet.

  Monsieur de Marchaumont, the Duke of Alençon’s agent, was at her side. She flourished the sword. Mendoza had demanded Drake’s head as well as the treasure which he had confiscated. Now, she said, she had a gilded sword with which to strike it off. Then she handed the sword to de Marchaumont. It should be he who actually gave the accolade; and whilst Drake knelt, the Frenchman laid the sword across his shoulder. It was not the only amenity at the disposal of Gloriana which Monsieur de Marchaumont enjoyed on that notable afternoon. She dropped on the deck a garter of purple and gold with a faulty clasp. Monsieur de Marchaumont stooped and picked it up, and being a gallant man would have kept it. But Gloriana was short of a garter and claimed it. But, being gallant woman as he was gallant man, she rewarded him doubly. First she lifted her skirt and fixed the garter round her knee before his eyes, and secondly she sent it to him afterwards.

  But it was Drake’s afternoon. There was a great concourse of people. The Queen “consecrated the ship with great ceremony, pomp and magnificence, eternally to be remembered.” She decreed that the ship should be placed in a dock and a house built over it so that more than the memory of it should live to hearten and inspire other daring men. A wooden bridge between shore and ship was broken during the ceremonies by the multitude which pressed upon it, and a hundred people fell with it. They nevertheless received no harm at all, Camden writes, insomuch that the ship seemed to have been built in a happy conjunction of the planets. It was, in fact, Drake’s day. He had John Drake with him in London throughout these months — the boy who painted charts and pictures of the coast during the long afternoons in the cabin of the Golden Hind and won the gold chain for being the first to catch sight of the Cacafuego. He was now a lad of seventeen, and just a year later was to sail as Captain of a ship with Fenton on his ill-fated expedition to the Moluccas. He never came back. He was captured on the River Plate, received good treatment as a prisoner until he was discovered to be his famous cousin’s relative. From that moment he lived the sort of miserable life of which Miles Philips and Job Hartop have given us an account, and passed out of all men’s ken, so that whether he died young or dragged out a cheerless and pitiable age remains a secret. It is a pleasant consolation to know that he had at all events this one year for wonder and enjoyment — the pride of walking with his glorious cousin, “the people swarming daily in the streets to behold him and vowing hatred to all that durst mislike him.”

  “It was roses, roses, all the way,

  With myrtle mixed in my path like mad.

  The house-roofs seemed to heave and sway,

  The church spires flamed, such flags they had.”

  The sight of the great Queen, the sound of her voice, the ballads, the tournays in the tilt-yard of the Palace, the gardens and the shining river and all the sparkle of London — just a glimpse of fairyland for the boy before the darkness swallowed him up.

  There is a story that Sir Francis Drake, needing a coat of arms to match his title, laid his hands, accustomed to take what he wanted without overmuch questioning, upon the armorial bearings of a west-country family named Drake with which he had the most distant connection — if any at all. Sir Bernard Drake, the story runs, indignant at this impudence, boxed the upstart’s ears in the precincts, if not in the presence, of the Court; and the Queen thereupon granted to her new favourite a brand-new coat of arms of everlasting honour to himself. The legend is held to be absurd in that Drake was not the man to take a blow lying down; and indeed it is a difficult point which no admirer of the great
sailor would take lying down without much better evidence than exists. But the Elizabethans, like Bernard Drake, were high-mettled violent fellows who were quite capable of boxing an enemy’s ears one moment and bursting into tears on their knees before the Queen afterwards. And most Englishmen, like Francis Drake — even the noblest of them — have some touch of the snob in their natures. It is certain, at all events, that Elizabeth did grant him a coat of arms which has something of a sneer at the family of Sir Bernard Drake. The shield was sable, a fess wavy between two stars argent, the arctic and antarctic. The crest was a globe terrestrial on which rode a ship under sail held by a golden cable in a hand appearing out of clouds. In the rigging was caught a wyvern upside down, and a wyvern was the arms of Sir Bernard’s family. Above the globe were the words “Divino Auxilio,” and below, “Sic parvis magna.”

  As the summer drew on, Drake, thus made a complete gentleman, returned to his wife in Plymouth. In the autumn, he bought from his friends Christopher Harris and John Hale, Buckland Abbey. These two friends had bought it from Sir Richard Grenville for £3,400 at the end of 1580; and possibly on Drake’s account. Buckland Abbey was — for within the last few years it has been burnt out — a large house on the upper ground at the back of the town. Within view of his park gates rose the wild Tor, from which at a later date he was to bring the water to the town, with so much care and skill that to this day Plymouth draws part of its supply from his source and channel. In the autumn of this year he was elected Mayor and took up for the time the life of a provincial magnate.

  But he was not forgotten in London. On the day before the Queen knighted Francis Drake at Deptford, Mr. Secretary Walsingham drafted two plans for the consideration of Her Majesty’s Council. Both aimed at snatching Portugal out of Philip’s hand. The first of them, as it was the more audacious, so it held the greater promise, and the Council accepted it. A fleet of eight ships and six pinnaces was to be mobilized. Drake was to be the General, Captain Richard Bingham the second in command. Martin Frobisher, Gilbert York and Edward Fenton were to have ships; and as many of the practised mariners of the Golden Hind as could be collected were to serve as warrant officers. A thousand men would be carried; the fleet would fly the standard of Don Antonio, and Don Antonio would be on board. It was, in the jargon of today, a super expedition, and it was to sail openly out to the islands of the Azores. Terceira, the largest of the group, refused to acknowledge the accession of Philip to the throne of Portugal, though his claim was stronger than Antonio’s. It stood firm for the bastard nephew against the husband of the daughter. At Terceira, Don Antonio’s standard was to be raised, and Drake, sitting like a great spider in the shining web of the seas, was to swallow the treasure fleets from the Indies and the River Plate as they converged upon the Port of Lisbon. Drake and his eight great ships and his thousand mariners across the gold road of the Atlantic, and Philip might whistle for his money. That is, if men do whistle on their way to the Bankruptcy Court.

  It was an astute plan, based upon Walsingham’s lifelong formula: “The best way to bridle their malice is the interrupting of the Indian fleets.” Spain, a giant, had in that day a giant’s rickety legs. She had no industries and a miserable agriculture; she paid but she did not make; she bought her commodities from England and Holland, even her clothes, even her salt fish and her grain. England bought her vineyards and worked them. She had no merchant fleet, for she did not trade. The great middle-class was growing fast in England, fostered by Elizabeth as a barrier against the power of her nobles. The Cecils and the Walsinghams sprang from it. There was nothing corresponding to them in the synthesis of Spain. Spain lived on American gold, and because she made nothing which she could sell, she never had enough of it. She was the great purchaser and always in debt; and the bankers of Genoa and Augsburg were buttoning up their pockets when Philip’s agents with many bows and more promises forced their way into their parlours. A few small ships carrying treasure — that was the spinal cord of Spain; and Drake and the fine sailors under him were the right men in the right place to snap it. It is not extravagant to say that if this expedition had been faithfully carried out as it was planned, the Armada would never have sailed out of Lisbon Harbour.

  The plan was put into practice at the first auspiciously enough. Leicester, Drake, Hawkins and the Queen contributed the bulk of the capital. Walsingham, who was poor, invested two hundred pounds, and Burghley was so far won over to the idea of War as a Joint-Stock enterprise that he, too, put in the same amount. But Don Antonio crept across the Channel from some hiding-place in France, and running to ground in Stepney, began to call for a larger fleet. Money, he pleaded, was coming to him from Terceira. He had jewels, he said. He certainly had a fine diamond ring, and that was passed on as a guarantee to Walsingham, who, zealous as ever to come to grips with Philip, had rashly underwritten the whole enterprise. Walsingham handed it to his wife and she wore it on her finger.

  Meanwhile nothing was proceeding smoothly among the active leaders. Drake suspected Gilbert York of being in secret communication with Mendoza. Frobisher, a fine sailor, was an uncouth and difficult man. His three expeditions in search of the North-West Passage to Cathay had brought nothing but ruin and disappointment to his supporters; and here was Drake at his elbow, rich, magnificent, and a trifle overbearing. Jealousies and squabbles took the place of co-operation. Fenton, moreover, who had the backing of the Muscovy Company, was an incompetent. So there, plain to view amidst their councils, were the three elements which Drake had learnt most of all to dread — treachery, jealousy, incompetence. It was not to be wondered at that when he was asked to subscribe more towards that larger fleet which Don Antonio demanded, he refused.

  The preparations which should have been completed in June dragged on throughout the year. Queen Elizabeth sent Walsingham to Paris as her Ambassador to enlist the help of France, and no man had a more thankless task. He might well say that he had rather she had sent him to the Tower. It is not suitable in a Life of Drake to describe the amazing shifts and expedients of Elizabeth at this time. She filled her Ministers with dismay. As Froude relates, her policy was the web of Penelope, woven in the day and unravelled during the night. She wanted everything both ways, and if there was a third way she wanted that too. France, with Alençon as its Prince, was to take the field openly against Spain in the Netherlands. She herself would help — oh, very surely — with money and underhand. France was to declare war with Spain, and again she would help — with money and underhand. France was to send ships to join in the Terceira expedition, but it would sail under Don Antonio’s flag, so it would not be an English expedition. The French King had been persuaded to send a small squadron of ships to the Azores, but if she wanted him to declare war with Spain she must come out into the open and stand at his side. He, or rather his mother, Catherine de Medici, knew his sister of England well. She would slip out of the collar and look on, unless they saw to it in France. Don Antonio’s demand for a larger fleet gave her an excuse to slip out. She would advance no more money, and Drake and Leicester between them made up the amount. Finally, she stopped Drake and Frobisher from sailing and would only allow a few small frigates of insufficient importance to embroil her with Philip. Don Antonio with the ships which he had bought sailed down the Thames in a rage, flying his own flag, and was detained at the Isle of Wight by Elizabeth’s order. He was allowed to slip away and, joining a second French squadron at Belle Isle under Philip Strozzi, made the island of St. Michael in the Azores. There Don Antonio went ashore and hoisted his flag in the citadel, and there, too, old Santa Cruz, the Admiral of Lepanto, caught Strozzi on a lee-shore and utterly destroyed him. Thus a fine plan came to the ignominious end which waits upon hesitations and weak armaments. Pressed forward with determination, the enterprise of Terceira must have been a successful example of the supreme function of sea-power; a blockade cutting off from the enemy the one material without which she could not live, gold. It was really just the same scheme which Menendez had set on
foot in the year 1574; the seizure of the Scilly Isles and the blockade of England. The scheme was abandoned after Menendez’ death and an outbreak of disease in the troops assembling at Vigo. Santa Cruz let it lie. The truth is that the theory and practice of sea-power were not yet understood even by the great sailors. Menendez probably had the shrewdest insight. Santa Cruz was a great tactician, but of a school which the English were in 1588 to destroy. Sea-power to him, as to all the sailors before the day of Menendez and Drake, meant the reproduction upon the water of a battle on the land. To close and grapple and board; to fight with musket and pike on the deck; these were the aims of Admirals. The guns were rather to disable ships than to sink them, and they were aimed, therefore, at masts and sails rather than at hulls. Hence, too, the height of the warship above the water line. The soldier had the advantage of dropping down on to the deck of his enemy, rather than the disadvantage of climbing up to it. Hence, too, the greater importance and care given to the soldier over the sailor. The commander was the General and took precedence of the Admiral. He might be both General and Admiral, as was the case with Santa Cruz at Terceira and Drake in the expeditions which he commanded. But it was as General that he held the command. Drake was learning always, but at this time he had not developed the knowledge of sea-power which he was afterwards to use. Otherwise he would have pressed with all the great influence which he now possessed for the enterprise of the Azores.