Having sent Essex and their letters off, Drake and Norreys put to sea in search of Robert Crosse and the main body of the victualling ships. But off Cape Espichel they were becalmed; and lying scattered they were attacked by twelve galleys which had been lurking under the protection of the guns of St. Julian’s Castle, reinforced by nine more from Andalusia. By putting out boats, Drake was able to tow most of his merchant ships to the neighbourhood of the Queen’s ships. He lost, however, four, and so yet another item was added to the list of charges against him. On June 11th the fleet was able to sail, and before it reached Cape St. Vincent it fell in with Crosse’s food ships as they returned from Cadiz. Orders were now issued that if the wind blew from the north, all ships would sail for the Azores; if from the south, for the Bayona Isles. It blew from the south and, swelling to a gale, dispersed twenty-five ships, including the Queen’s ship, the Aid. By June 19th, however, the fleet was reunited in Vigo Bay. Of the army, two thousand men were all that remained fit for active service, but they were landed. They met with no resistance, and having ravaged the country for miles, burnt Vigo to the ground. It was then decided that for the expedition to the Azores Drake should man and victual the best twenty ships and that Norreys should conduct the others home.
Throughout this voyage, at Plymouth, at Coruña, at Cascaes, the one relentless enemy had been the weather. It was now to strike its hardest blow. As Drake led his twenty ships out of the Vigo River to the Bayona islands, a gale more furious than any which they had endured, smote them and scattered them. Crosse and Fenner were driven as far south as the Madeiras; some managed to creep back into the Vigo River; Drake found himself out in the Atlantic on a sinking ship. The Revenge, which had seen so much wild work in the Armada battles and was to see still more before she gloriously ended her career, sprang a leak, and it needed all the manpower on board to keep her afloat. There was no course for him but to make for Plymouth, where he dropped his anchor on one of the last days of June. Norreys arrived on the 28th, and the rest of that great fleet during the days which followed. Probably not more than two thousand men of all who had set out on April 7th returned in health. On board the Gregory, only eight men were fit for deck work; on Thomas Fenner’s Dreadnought, out of a crew of three hundred men, a hundred and fourteen were dead, three had escaped all sickness, and just eighteen had strength enough to man the capstan and furl the sails.
Thus miserably ended the greatest armed expedition which England had ever sent out against an enemy abroad. A fleet as large as the Armada, an army which on the muster rolls numbered twenty thousand soldiers, and not even its worst critic reckoned as less than seventeen thousand. That there was nothing presumptuous in the plan was proved by the small resistance which the army encountered. If it had succeeded, England would have been spared years of war and the ever-recurring threat of another invasion. But it failed. There were multitudinous reasons offered for the failure. The fleet left Plymouth without its proper provisions. There was no siege-train. Time was wasted at Coruña, and food too. The army should have marched upon Lisbon from Cascaes, not from Peniche. Drake should have sailed up the Tagus on that morning of his arrival when the wind was fair.
That last argument is very much on a par with the argument that Jellicoe should not have turned aside at the battle of Jutland. It is an ex post facto argument. There might have been submarines. There might have been a city in which revolt was not seething. Both Admirals observed the rules of war which experience had taught them to observe. A chance taken would have given one Lisbon and the disruption of the Spanish Empire, the other the destruction of the German High Sea Fleet. But you cannot sit in judgment on a man who refuses a chance which, if it turned out unhappily, would have meant utter defeat and his just condemnation by all his country. The real reasons for the failure of the expedition are rather to be found in the divided command, the want of co-ordination between army and navy — an old story in English history. But Drake acquiesced. That is the astonishing factor in this melancholy story. He who had hitherto taken such forethought in his preparations that, when the moment of action came, he could improvise like lightning with little risk, he acquiesced in a slow, slovenly hand-to-mouth campaign in which the strategy was bad and the tactics worse. Had the long years, the hard strenuous life of the sea, worn down the fine edge of his clear incisive spirit? Let who will decide!
Those who had taken part in the adventure began quickly to lift their voices in high praise of what they had done. The sailors raised riots in the streets of London on the ground that they had not been paid enough for their great services. Camden himself wrote, “Most certain it is that England was so far a gainer by this expedition as from that time to apprehend no incursions from Spain.”
But Drake said nothing at all.
CHAPTER XXII
DRAKE ON LAND. HIS LAST EXPEDITION. THE DEATH OF JOHN HAWKINS. THE DEATH OF DRAKE.
FRANCIS DRAKE DID as wise men do when truth and talk are both against them. He went away to his own place and his own people. The Queen and the London merchants had lost their faith in his star. Of his staunch friends, Leicester was dead and Walsingham, overborne with poverty, work, the Queen’s rebuffs and his grievous malady, was dying. Frobisher was in high favour; Lord Howard in still higher; new men were following with success the trails which Drake had laid. Thomas Cavendish, between 1586 and 1588, had sailed round the world and come home with an immense treasure; Watt, a London merchant, lay in wait with a private squadron of his own in the Yucatan channel and captured two of the richest galleons of the Mexican gold fleet; the Earl of Cumberland, who had commanded a ship in the battles against the Armada, went off to the Azores in the Victory with some privateers, held Fayal to ransom and returned with many prizes; Philip of Spain, upon the assassination of Henri III, the last of the Valois Kings, made war upon Henri of Navarre, and so relieved the anxieties of England. Most men of real value have made enemies by the time when they reach the age of forty. Drake was forty-four, and he had by his self-confidence made perhaps more than his due share. There was a feeling at the Court, pleasurable to many, that they could carry on without Drake in the future. And, indeed, he would have been spared his last humiliating voyage if that view had prevailed to the end and the greatness of his service only been recognized after his death.
But during the years of his retirement he was not idle. In 1590, Philip landed troops in Brittany and set about fortifying the port of Blavet, in the neighbourhood of Lorient. The Queen was delighted that Spain should have switched its “Enterprise” from her to Huguenot France, but a fortified Blavet was too near the Channel for her comfort. Drake was sent to the Brittany coast on a voyage of reconnaissance and brought back an earnest prayer from Henri de Bourbon, the King’s agent, that he would use his favour with Elizabeth to get help from her. But Drake had little favour in those days with Queen Elizabeth, and though help was sent in the form of two squadrons of twenty ships each, the command of them was divided between Hawkins and Frobisher. Drake was dismissed to Plymouth to supervise the fortification of that city: and harbour against a possible attempt at invasion.
It had been for years Drake’s aim to make Plymouth a fine naval station; and he seized this opportunity to carry through, by a contract with the corporation, his scheme for giving the town an ample and steady supply of fresh water from the River Leat. Meanwhile, upon the sea, Drake’s successors had achieved little. Hawkins and Frobisher were succeeded by Lord Thomas Howard and Sir Richard Grenville. The loss of the Revenge and the death of Sir Richard Grenville off Flores stirred all England with a story of a rather braggart kind of heroism. It increased a well-grounded fear that Philip had profited by the lessons which Drake and Cavendish and Hawkins had taught him, and was building up a navy of greater strength on more efficient lines. A swift postal service to the West Indies by new fast frigates named “avisos” had been introduced. A young Menendez at Havana, son of that Menendez who had planned to seize the Scilly Isles and control the Channel, had improved up
on the convoy system of the Indian Guard. The gold ships were now to disembark their precious cargoes at Havana. There they were to be taken on board small fast cruisers, each armed with twenty guns, their sailing speed increased by sweeps. Whilst once more a fleet of invasion was being collected, but this time at Passages.
The naval policy of England had fallen back into the old rut from which Drake had lifted it: a squadron in the Narrow Seas, the most of the fleet at anchor in Gillingham Reach, but ready to resist an invasion, and an occasional expedition to disintegrate Philip’s West Indian trade. It was Hawkins’ policy, not Drake’s, and it failed.
In 1592, however, certain events took place which began the restoration of Drake to the Queen’s favour. Early in the year, Raleigh was entrusted with the command of a fleet of sixteen ships and a complement of soldiers. Two of the ships, the Garland and the Foresight, were Queen’s ships, the rest merchantmen and privateers. With Raleigh, Robert Crosse was to sail as Vice-Admiral and Sir John Borough as the Captain-General of the land forces. Before, however, the fleet could get away, Raleigh changed the plan of the expedition. Its aim was to have been the West Indies and a march on Panama. Raleigh proposed to wait for the treasure fleets, which were not expected to reach Spain until the first week of August. Raleigh’s intention leaked out and he was recalled, and Frobisher appointed in his place. The appointment was fatal. Neither Crosse nor Borough would serve under him. They took the Foresight and some of the fleet off with them to the Azores. Frobisher, with what was left, sailed for Cape St. Vincent. But the days when Drake had held that station, daring all the might of Spain to dislodge him, had gone. Frobisher returned almost empty-handed. On the other hand, Borough and Crosse fell in with a squadron of the Earl of Cumberland off the Azores, and between them they captured a Portuguese East Indiaman which was not merely the biggest ship afloat but carried such a treasure of jewels, plate, silks and spices as had never been taken in any carrack before. Nor had there ever been such mad looting. During the night which followed her capture, the Madre de Dios was four times set on fire by the candles of the sailors despoiling her. It was Crosse on the Foresight who seized and boarded her after a stern fight. It was said that he took ten thousand pounds from her to begin with, and he confessed to two thousand. A sailor with the engaging name of Whiskynges was contented with a mere half a peck of pearls; and Sir Robert Cecil, when he travelled down to Dartmouth to assess the cargo, wrote to his father, Lord Burghley, that he could almost smell the sailors as far off as Exeter, so laden were they with musk and amber. Long before the Madre de Dios was brought into Dartmouth, the news of her vast treasure and the wild looting of it was rife.
The Queen appointed Drake, John Hawkins’ son and Sir Robert Cecil to recover the loot and apportion the cargo. For the recovery of the loot they were late in the day. The Foresight had sailed on to Portsmouth, and the Dainty, which had a share in the capture, to Harwich; and both towns made the Caledonian market on a Friday look like a Fair at an Esquimaux settlement. One man bought eighteen hundred diamonds and a number of rubies — between two and three hundred — from a mariner for one hundred and sixty pounds and sold them again for two hundred. Bargains were bought backwards and forwards in the course of a day, until the price reached five times what the sailor had originally sold them for. But even when the jewels had gone, the bulk of the cargo, cinnamon, pepper, cochineal, silks, carpets, ebony, drugs, was valued at more than a hundred and forty thousand pounds. Of this sum, Cumberland, Raleigh and Hawkins all got their portions, but the Queen by far the biggest. She had put in three thousand pounds, of which twelve hundred was spent on fitting out the Garland and the Foresight, but she received close upon ninety thousand for her share in the expedition, and no doubt was inclined to look upon her Commissioners with kindly eyes. There began to be talk of sending Francis Drake to sea again. Drake had, besides, made a friend of his fellow-Commissioner, Robert Cecil. And he was in London on view, Member of Parliament for Plymouth.
“Sir Francis Drake is at the Court,” a certain Philip Gawdy wrote to his brother, “and all the speech is that he goeth very shortly to sea. My Lord Thomas Howard is now there, but he stayed but ten days, and Sir Martin Frobisher, but Sir Francis Drake carryeth it away from them all.”
The Spanish menace was growing larger with every month which passed. Blavet being insufficient as a base, Philip had seized a position closer to Brest and was planning the occupation of that port. In February, therefore, a Subsidy Bill was presented to the House of Commons to provide the means to thwart him. Sir Robert Cecil dwelt powerfully on the peril to England if Brittany fell under the King of Spain’s control. “He would there have his Navy ready to annoy us,” he said, “which he could not otherwise so easily do unless he had the winds in a bag.” Drake and Raleigh supported him, and Sir George Carey announced that Her Majesty intended if the Bill were passed to send Drake against the Spaniards at the head of a great navy. After a long debate of eleven days the Bill was passed as it was drawn; and there the matter rested.
Drake remained in London. He served on a Committee of the House which dealt with the Ecclesiastical Court Bills; and on another which considered a Bill of Liberties and Privileges; and on a third which had for its object the relief of wounded soldiers and sailors; and on a fourth which drew up the Preamble to the Subsidy Bill; and on many other Committees. It was all, no doubt, very valuable work, but meanwhile Philip laid his hands on Quimper and Morlaix and occupied a promontory of the Crozon Peninsula opposite to Brest. Henri IV, as wily as any Bourbon who followed him on the throne of France, sat easy and did nothing. Elizabeth was forced to move. Brest a naval base in the hands of Spain was a peril which must be faced and averted. Norreys with an army and Frobisher with a fleet were despatched in October to relieve it. Drake was kept in reserve against a sudden aggression by the new Armada gathered at Passages. In the month of November, after some weeks of desperate fighting, Morlaix and Quimper surrendered and Brest was relieved. The English losses were heavy and included Martin Frobisher, who died from the mortification of his leg after a bullet had struck him in the thigh. He reached Plymouth and lingered long enough to receive a letter of gratitude from the Queen. He was a valiant man, a great sailor, but never a good Admiral. He was harsh and overbearing; he succeeded so little in securing the goodwill of his officers that those who had sailed with him once did not wish to sail with him again; he was the captain of a ship rather than the commander of a fleet; and he was — that fatal attribute at sea — unlucky.
With the relief of Brest and all Brittany, except the small place of Hennabon, the immediate danger to England was past. Philip had troubles of his own to cope with in Arragon and Lisbon. He was short of money, and the bankers of Augsburg and Genoa had so much of his dishonoured paper already in their hands that they were unwilling to accept any more of it. In these circumstances, Drake proposed that he should be allowed to sail to Nombre de Dios with an army, march across the isthmus and destroy Panama. No doubt Drake was thinking with the memories of a time twenty years ago burning brightly within him and persuading him after these six years of sea-starvation that he could do the like again. He had been just under thirty in those joyous days, with an adoring company of lads under his command. Hardships, dangers, wounds, the ups and downs of adventure had all been not so much in the day’s work as in the day’s pleasure. It is the perennial delusion of the man of fifty that he can recapture himself at the age of thirty, meet the shifts of fortune with the same quick invention and endure fatigues with the same resilience. Drake was fifty years of age, and the last expedition to Lisbon should have warned him that his flair was not so precise, nor his authority so incisive and so welcome to his subordinates, as it had been in those days when they all had nothing to lose and the world to gain.
But the idea was sound enough. Carried through swiftly and secretly, the destruction of Panama, and the seizure of its treasure awaiting transportation, might have been for Philip’s Empire just that two-handed engine at the d
oor which stands ready to smite once and smite no more. But the plan needed to be taken as it was devised. The curse of these later Elizabethan expeditions, when the men propounding them had become famous people with dependencies upon the Royal favour, was that the Queen herself and timid counsellors like Burghley began at once to diminish their audacity, to add this or that desirable preliminary, and above all to tie leading-strings about the leaders. Thus, Drake was first of all given an associate: his old chief in the days of the disaster of St. John de Ulua, his squadron leader in the Armada battles; the Treasurer of the Navy through many years, Sir John Hawkins. No doubt the reason for this provision was that given by Thomas Maynarde, a soldier well-disposed to Drake, who sailed with him on the expedition. “But entering into them (i.e. the Spanish Indies) as the child of fortune, it may be his self-willed and peremptory command was doubted and that caused Her Majestie, as should seem, to join Sir John Hawkins in equal commission; a man old and wary entering into matters with so laden a foot that the other’s meat would be eaten before his spit could come to the fire.”
Hawkins was not merely wary, he was weary. As far back as September of the Armada year he had written to Walsingham the letter of a dispirited man crying for a rest from his labours. “My pain and misery in this service is infinite,” and “Every man must have his turn served though very unreasonable; yet if it be refused, then adieu friendship”; and “God I trust will deliver me of it ere it be long for there is no other hell”; “and so being ever fatigated with a number of troubles I humbly take my leave.”
Complete Works of a E W Mason Page 901