No mistake had been made. She was the San Felipe, “richly laden to our happy joy and great gladness.” Indeed, of all the prizes which Drake had captured there was none to compare with this. She carried many hundreds of tons of spices and gums from the Moluccas. Chests of rare china and porcelain were piled in her holds; with bales of velvet and silk and such a store of bullion and jewels that she was valued for her cargo alone at just fifty pounds less than a hundred and fourteen thousand pounds sterling. By this one capture, the expedition to Cadiz had been made not merely a crippling stroke to Philip’s power and ambitions, but a most profitable adventure. For the loan of her four warships and her two pinnaces, Queen Elizabeth received forty thousand pounds. Multiply by ten, add that she paid not a farthing towards the wages of the officers and crews or their food, and it will be seen that she came very well out of the business. It is said that, like Oliver, she asked for more but with less reason, using as her argument that it was her ship, the Elizabeth Bonaventure, which actually took the prize. Drake’s share was seventeen thousand pounds, and for three months’ work that cannot be said to be a bad return. A portion of her cargo showed for the twentieth time how far in one respect Drake was ahead of his century. His tenderness with the blacks and humbler races had no doubt, in Darien, at San Domingo and other places in the West, brought him profit by the hundredfold. But it was a natural tenderness, not an item of policy. Diego of the Cimaroons he kept with him as his servant till he died. There was an aged negro brought on board the Golden Hind from the ship of Gregorio Alvarez off Paita whom Drake insisted upon manumitting, until the old fellow dropped upon his knees and implored to be sent back to a dying master as old as himself. On the San Felipe four hundred negroes were prisoners, bound for the slave-markets of Spain and Portugal. Drake not merely set them free. He dealt most favourably with them “and gave them one of his flyboats to go whither they wished.”
But on board the San Felipe there was found treasure of greater worth than spices or rare china or bullion or negroes. In his voyage round the world, Drake had secured for England certain trading rights and privileges from the King of Ternate; and soon after his return a beginning had been made towards establishing an East Indian trade by the Muscovy Company. Now the papers on board the San Felipe revealed for the first time the details of the vast monopoly exercised by the Portuguese, its organisation and its profits. From these papers sprang the East India Company of London, and those who are accustomed to traduce Drake as a mere freebooter on a great scale might think again and wonder whether without him the Imperial Crown of India would ever have rested on the head of Queen Victoria.
The San Felipe was captured upon June 9th. A return to Cape St. Vincent was now out of the question. Drake had no longer the necessary ships nor sufficient men in good health properly to handle what he had. He had written for reinforcements to Walsingham. But it was not Walsingham who would decide whether they should be sent or not. It was obviously wise that Drake should return home himself, add his personal prayers, more persuasive by reason of the San Felipe’s treasure, to those of Walsingham, and lead a new and revitalized fleet back to the Peninsula. He set sail accordingly for the Channel and anchored in Plymouth Sound on the 26th of June, three months after he had sailed out from it.
Mr. Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of England, speaking of the Royal Air Force in the last days of August, 1940, said: “Never was so much owed by so many to so few.” There are no words like monosyllables to drive home a truth as a hammer drives home a nail; and no Englishman will gainsay him. But the expedition of Drake to Cadiz comes very close to earning the same gratitude from the same countrymen. It was brilliant in the swiftness of its improvisations, startling in its success, and, if it did not save England, it gave her an absolutely necessary year in which to prepare her own salvation. It required military genius to discern the value of Cape Sagres, military courage to make the hazardous onslaught and to carry the day. Never were general instructions given by a statesman to a commander more completely fulfilled. At no point can we say with Borough that Drake was rash and took risks with Her Majesty’s ships of war which he had no right to take. Drake had learnt his enemy and was justified of his learning. His swift appearances and disappearances increased the terror of his name. When he appeared, the battle was already more than three-quarters won. When he disappeared, the hush of suspense took his place and did his work. Policy, not bravado, led him up the coast to flaunt his flag and destroy the shipping at the very mouth of Lisbon. Here was Santa Cruz, the great Admiral, in his castle of St. Julian! Here were twenty-seven ships of the Invincible Armada which was to burn Elizabeth at the stake in the front of St. Paul’s and endow England with the blessings of the Holy Inquisition. Yet here too was Drake, burning ships instead of heretics and daring Santa Cruz to come out and fight him like a man. Ships stayed in their ports for fear of him. Soldiers who should have sailed in convoys tramped in long slow marches overland. It is not to be wondered at that in Spanish eyes he was an incarnation of the Devil with a familiar and magic mirrors and all the paraphernalia of the witches to assist him. But he was just an Englishman with a great trust in himself and a greater trust in God, who, by the path of drudgery and mistakes recognized and corrected, and his own native skill polished to an edge, had raised himself to greatness. When he set out from Plymouth on April 2nd, the Armada was to sail for the invasion of England during that summer. Off Lisbon, Drake had stopped a Portuguese bark carrying letters from Santa Cruz to his friends abroad. In one of them that fierce old fire-eating Don wrote that the King had made proclamation that he would to England this year, and would not leave one alive of mankind above the age of seven. But when Drake dropped his anchor in Plymouth on June 26th, there was no talk in Spain of the invasion of England. Santa Cruz, under the orders of King Philip, was tumbling the soldiers as they arrived from their long marches into his galleons and setting out on a wild-goose chase to save the gold fleet at the Azores.
A sentence written by an enemy as generous as he was expert, and quoted in the notes to the Naval Tracts of Sir William Monson, may well conclude this chapter. Captain C. Fernandez Durо wrote in his “Armada Española” of Drake’s campaign: “With reason do historians maintain that there is not in the annals of England an expedition comparable to it.”
CHAPTER XVII
THE CADIZ EXPEDITION DISAPPROVED IN LONDON. PREPARATIONS FOR THE ARMADA. NAVAL STRATEGY. DRAKE’S COMMAND.
ROBERT LENG, OF whom nothing is known beyond his name, served under Drake in this voyage to the coasts of Spain and wrote a short narrative of the proceedings. Something of a Euphuist, he ends with a high-flown passage from which one phrase may for a moment be rescued from oblivion. He coined an alternative to envious courtiers. They were “boasting salivators”; and amongst boasting salivators Sir Francis Drake found himself upon his return to England.
It was galling. If ever he had deserved recognition for swift and invaluable service to his country, it was now. But he was received coldly. The party of Spain was uppermost in the Queen’s favour. A Commission was on the point of sailing for Flanders, there to arrange an armistice as a preliminary to a treaty of peace with Parma, who, for his part, only thought of peace as a silence brooding over the ashes of England. But a belief that a real give-and-take peace was possible was at this time strong in the Court and the Council. There was wishful thinking in those days as in ours. Burghley himself probably shared it. No doubt the news of the havoc and destruction which Drake had wreaked on Spanish preparations and Spanish ships had confirmed the belief. “The truth is,” a Venetian Ambassador declared, “that he has done so much damage on these coasts alone that though the King were to obtain a most signal victory against him, he would not recover one-half the loss he has suffered.” Therefore, so the argument ran, Philip, through his Viceroy Parma, would be the more eager for a treaty. Only, Drake and his exploits must not be mentioned, must not be supposed to have had any influence in persuading Philip. Therefore the cold sh
oulder for Drake.
But there was another difficulty. Whilst the expedition to Cadiz might well be the great persuasion, it was also the great obstacle. Owing to the reluctance which Elizabeth always, and Philip up to the date of the death of Mary Stuart, had felt to enter upon an open state of war, a curious interpretation of the grounds for war had grown up in both countries. It was not a cause for war if Philip seized English sailors and travellers and burnt them as heretics or sent them to the galleys and confiscated English ships. On the other side, it was not a cause for war if English privateers retaliated by capturing Philip’s galleons and the fine cargoes they carried. They might raid the gold fleet or even hold to ransom Spanish towns, and it would not mean war, so long as those towns were in the Indies or in one of Philip’s colonies. It would not mean war, again, if Philip connived at the assassination of Elizabeth or strove to provoke a rebellion by the Catholics; as it would not mean war if Elizabeth by secret payments kept the Netherlands in a flame, or by the same means prompted France to attack Spain or financed and lent ships of war to Don Antonio to establish his claim to the throne of Portugal. But there must be a sort of decency about it, an admission of grievances and an excuse. Philip could plead that the Holy Office was independent of his control, as Stalin nowadays asserts that he is not responsible for the Comintern, and with just as much truth. Elizabeth, on the other side, could maintain that it was natural that her sailors should exact a return for the wrongs done to them without taking her into their confidence.
But there were none the less things which must not be done. Elizabeth could not accept the crown of the Netherlands without open war, and she had refused it. She could not enter the ports by force or occupy the land of Spain proper without open war following, and that is just what Drake had done.
At once the partisans of Spain were loud in their censures. Sir James Croft, the Comptroller of the Royal Household and the chief of the Commissioners who were to negotiate the peace, went so far as to accuse Drake of defrauding the Queen of her proper share of the profits and of using the stolen money to suborn the officers of her Navy. Most were content to say that he had overstepped his authority and that the landing on Spanish soil must be officially disallowed.
There is some doubt about the extent of Drake’s authority. It is an odd circumstance that the actual Commission and the instructions given to Drake under the Queen’s hand have disappeared. Borough, in the protest which he sent to Drake before the attack upon Sagres, had asserted that the Lord High Admiral had forbidden any landing. Certainly Drake had Walsingham’s authority. But it is not impossible that Walsingham, who had some touch of the Jesuit in his nature, had added that instruction that Drake should distress the King of Spain in his own havens, knowing that the seed would fall on ground very likely to produce a harvest, and hoping to bring the Queen’s hesitation to an end by a flagrant act of war which could not be gainsaid.
But, if not gainsaid, it could be officially disallowed; and this is what happened. In July of that year, Burghley wrote to Andreas de Loo in Flanders:
“I bethought myself that you would think I had not answered one great scruple mentioned in your letter, by the Duke of Parma remembered, which was that he misliked greatly the actions of Sir Fr. Drake, doubting that they might alienate the King’s mind from the inclining to peace; where-unto this answer ought to satisfy you to be delivered if hereafter the Duke shall reiterate that scruple. True it is, and I avow it upon my faith, Her Majesty did send a ship expressly with a message by letters, charging him not to show any act of hostility before he went to Cales: which messenger could never come to the place where he was....And so unwitting, yea, unwilling to Her Majesty those actions were committed by Sir Fr. Drake for the which Her Majesty is as yet greatly offended with him.”
There was never a genuine sympathy between these two great figures of a great reign, Burghley and Drake. For each lacked what the other had, and was the worse for the want. Burghley had the true Foreign Office spirit, as alive today as it was in him; that over-finical respect for the letter which insisted on allowing Italy, the self-declared enemy to be, to secure a year’s invaluable stock of oil because she had not yet gone through the form of recalling her Ambassador and making an open declaration of war. Just in the same way, Burghley disapproved of the attack upon Cadiz and the capture of Capes Sagres and St. Vincent. Though those two actions broke down Spain’s preparations for a twelvemonth and put off for that incomputable period the attempted invasion of England, they were not correct, they were unmannerly, they must be disavowed. For a little time there had been, it is true, some show of cordiality between the two men. But it had not lasted. Nothing was more offensive to Burghley than braggadocio, and Drake’s taunts and challenges to Santa Cruz, as he cruised unmolested at the mouth of the Tagus, were mere indiscreet brags and opprobrious words, “whereby the King of Spain’s indignation hath been aggravated without the especial benefit of Her Majesty or any diminution to the Spanish greatness.” “Treat ’em rough,” was not to be found in any Spanish phrase-book in Burghley’s library.
For Drake, then, in this summer of the year before the Armada, there was in Spain terror, respect, a deep admiration; in England there was the cold shoulder. His ships were to be paid off. He was to lead no reinforcements back to Cape St. Vincent. He was to be explained away with apologies. He was not even to have, what he dearly wanted, the execution of Borough.
Whether his exasperation at the treatment which he was receiving drove him to an unusual bitterness in this affair, as it has been suggested, we have no clue to resolve. It may be. He was never a bloodthirsty man. His gentle consideration of the ladies expecting babies at Venta Cruz, his conduct at the island of Mocha, and indeed the whole voyage of the circumnavigation of the world, are ample proofs. It may also be that the recollection of Doughty and all that happened in that grim, desolate harbour of Saint Julian, lay ever like a cloud on his brain, warping his nature, diminishing him so that any occurrence which bore the least likeness to it stung him to a fury. Certainly he pursued Borough with the animosity of a man avenging a personal affront rather than punishing an infringement of duty.
On July 25th he presented himself at Burghley’s house, “Theobalds,” where the Queen was paying a visit. He took down with him a casket of jewels from the San Felipe as a present for the Queen, and particulars of his charge against Borough. It was the day after Burghley had written the letter from which a quotation has been made to Andreas de Loo. It is not surprising, therefore, that his accusations were not immediately accepted. It is doubtful, indeed, whether Drake was by Naval Law entitled to take the high action which he had taken. He could supersede Borough and send him home to face such proceedings as the Crown in Council should decide. But to try an officer of Borough’s rank in his absence by summary court-martial and to sentence him to death was to make a precedent which was not covered by naval tradition or naval article. Burghley took the matter in hand himself. A good many accusations were bandied backwards and forwards. Drake charged Borough with cowardice, mutiny and desertion. Borough brought up the execution of Doughty and Drake’s flight from St. John de Ulua. It helped Borough’s case, no doubt, that the immediate cause of his arrest was his written protest against the attack on the castle of Sagres, which had been disallowed on Burghley’s advice. But it was an unedifying quarrel between the old traditional official and the bustling new Elizabethan, with neither of them at his best. In the end the trial was disallowed, as the capture of the four forts on the Cape St. Vincent had been. Borough went back to his old office chair as Clerk of the Ships, and was subsequently promoted to be Controller of the Navy. Neither he nor Drake was satisfied, Borough because his acquittal was not made public. But Burghley was wise. Drake would be needed again. Borough got back the job which he could do very well, and the less said the better.
Drake went home to Plymouth and paid off his ships. But a grain of hope was left to him. The Queen’s ships went back to their moorings in Gillingham Reach, bu
t the thirteen which he still had under his command were not to be dispersed. He was to keep them together ready for service if the negotiations with Parma should come to nothing. So the summer dragged through. In Spain the preparations for the invasion went with a more leaden foot than even Philip’s. Santa Cruz was still away, searching for Drake in the Azores. Corruption and incompetence ruled at Lisbon; soldiers died of starvation on the quays. And anxiety died down in England — anxiety, but not vigilance. The Queen’s ships swung to their moorings in Gillingham Reach, but they were good ships, and Hawkins, the Hawkins of St. John de Ulua, now Treasurer of the Navy, saw to it that they were kept good. When, a few months later, the fleet was mobilized, Lord Howard of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral, could write to Burghley:
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 889