greater statesman. He saw far ahead of his times, too far indeed, for
in his enlightened conviction that in the matter of taxation “what
touched all should be allowed of all” we have the real reason for that
revolt of the Baronage, which made a United Kingdom of the Fourteenth
Century an impossibility.
Yet as law-maker he did work which lasted longer than that which he
did on the battle-field. Like William the Norman, he was a stark man
who knew how to get himself obeyed, and order, no matter how dearly
bought, was the first thing to be got, and he got it. He could “make a
wilderness and call it peace,” as he did over and over again with Wales
and Scotland--and, indeed, to him a wilderness was better than a place
where disorder dwelt--but he also made another peace within his own
realms which was the first forerunner of that which we enjoy to-day.
The laws which he made were for rich and poor, great and small, alike.
The hand that was pitiless in destruction was also ready and strong to
protect.
The manner of his death is as characteristic as any of the acts, good
or bad, of his life. Old and weak and sick, he made the long journey
from Westminster to the Solway to fulfil the oath which he had sworn at
the knighting of his unworthy son to avenge Bruce’s murder of Comyns
and to punish his rebellion.
Too feeble to keep the saddle, he was carried in a litter at the head
of the hundred thousand men who were to be the instruments of his
vengeance, but at length the news of victory after victory won by the
Bruce stung him to a fury which for the time was stronger than his
weakness, and at Carlisle the old warrior left his litter and once
more mounted his charger. It is a pathetic sight even when looked at
through the mists of the intervening centuries. We can picture the
gallant struggle that he must have made to sit his horse upright and
to bear without fainting the weight of the armour that was oppressing
his disease-worn and weary limbs. The mailed hand which had struck the
great Count of Chalons down could not now even draw the sword that hung
useless at his side.
Only one thing remained strong in the man who had once been the very
incarnation of strength. His inflexible will was still unbroken and
unswerving in its devotion to the great ideal and master-project of
his life. Had that will had its way, the flood of English strength
and valour that was rolling slowly behind him would have burst in a
torrent of death and desolation over the war-wasted fields of southern
Scotland, and there can be but little doubt as to what the end would
have been.
But it was not to be. The Spectre Horseman was already riding by his
side, and, like the wine from a cracked goblet, the dregs of his
once splendid strength ebbed away. At last the skeleton hand was
outstretched, and he who had never been unhorsed by mortal foe was
stricken from the saddle. Yet even then the proud spirit refused to
yield. He took his place in the litter again. With almost dying lips he
ordered the army forward; and, though the end was very near, he did not
submit without a struggle, pathetic in its hopeless heroism, to conquer
even Death itself and carry out his purpose in spite of the King of
Terrors. Die he must, and that soon, but his spirit should live after
him and he would still lead his army.
“Bury me not till you have conquered Scotland!” were almost the last
words he spoke. Though they were disobeyed and Scotland was never
conquered, yet they were well worthy of the iron-hearted man who said
them.
III
_THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE_
“_THE MASTER-THIEF OF THE NEW WORLD_”
III
THE QUEEN’S LITTLE PIRATE
Another couple of centuries with a few added years have slipped
away, and the next scene of the slowly-unfolding drama opens on the
sea instead of the land. The Idea which Edward of the Long Legs had
so clearly conceived and so very nearly realised, the idea that the
frontiers of the United Kingdom of which he had dreamt should be its
sea-coasts has all the time been growing and deepening, for, like all
ideas which faithfully reflect some fact in the universe, it could not
die, and was bound some day to become a fact itself.
Politically, England and Scotland were still independent kingdoms, but
many old differences had been forgotten and forgiven, and they had
come a great deal closer, as it was fitting that they should do on the
eve of their final union. Moreover, they were one in their dread and
hatred of that cruel and implacable Colossus which, with one foot on
the East and the other on the West, bestrode the world, drawing vast
treasures from hidden El Dorados with which it built countless ships,
and hired and armed innumerable men for the enslavement of mankind. For
now we have reached those “spacious times of great Elizabeth,” when
that lusty young giant of Liberty, recently born into the world, was
girding on his armour, and making him ready to grapple with the powers
of oppression and darkness which were just then most fitly incarnated
in the shape of Spain.
It is almost impossible for us of the present day to understand clearly
what the Spain of those days was. She was the first naval and military
Power in the world, her ships and armies were everywhere, her wealth
was honestly believed to be illimitable, and moreover she was the
recognised champion of the Catholic Church, whose spiritual thunders
mingled with the roar of her guns, and which supplemented the terror of
her arms by all the diabolical enginry of torture and the awful powers
of the Holy Office.
The world, in short, was on the eve of great and marvellous doings--on
the one hand so terrible in their deadly earnestness and tremendous
consequences, and on the other so fantastically splendid in their
almost superhuman daring and undreamt-of rewards, that it looked as
though the Fates were preparing some gigantic miracle wherewith to
astound mankind. And so, in sober truth, they were, and the miracle
about to be wrought was the making of what we now call the British
Empire.
In the beginning of the latter half of the sixteenth century there was
a yellow-haired, blue-eyed, round-faced and sturdily-built youngster
sailing to and fro as ship’s boy in a tiny cockle-shell of a craft
plying with the humbler kinds of merchandise between the Thames and
the coasts of France and Flanders. Whether or not he had heard any of
those wondrous stories which the western gales were wafting across the
Atlantic from the golden Spanish Main we do not know, but probably he
had, and, like many another sailor-lad of his day, he had dreamt wild
dreams of blue seas and bright skies, of white-walled cities crammed
with gold, and of stately galleons staggering across that mysterious
sea stuffed to the deck with the treasures they were bringing to pour
into the coffers of the King of Spain.
And yet, wild as these dreams may have been, they would have been
commonplace in comparison with the bewildering exploits with which
this same blue-eyed sailor-lad was one day to realise and excel them.
For this was he whose name the mariners of Spain were soon to hear
shrieked out by the voice of the tempest, booming in the roar of guns,
and echoing through the crash of battle. This, in a word, was Francis
Drake--El Draque, the Dragon, child and servant of the Devil himself,
Scourge of the Church and Plunderer of the Faithful.
As I say, he may or may not have heard the story of the Golden West,
but it is quite certain that he did hear much of the black and terrible
tales which the refugees and exiles from France and the Netherlands
had to tell, for not a few of them crossed over in the little barque
in which he served, and he could not fail to hear what they had to say
of the murders and massacres, the torturing and outrage with which
Spain was disgracing her knightly fame and her ancient faith. They are
horrible enough for us to read even here in the security which that
gallant struggle won for us, and now when we can only hear the shrieks
of the tortured and the groans of the dying echoing faintly across
the gulf of three centuries; but what must they have been to Francis
Drake when he heard them told by those whose eyes had only just before
looked upon the hideous reality--perhaps indeed by some of those racked
and mutilated unfortunates who had managed to escape with their lives
to seek the sheltering hospitality of Gloriana the Queen? Was it any
wonder that deep down in his boyish heart there were planted those
seeds of hate and horror which later on were to bear such terrible
fruit?
The lad Francis seems to have performed his duties as ship’s boy as
well as he did everything else, whether it was leading the Queen’s
ships to harry the coast of Spain or raging and storming through one of
his piratical raids among the Fortunate Isles of the West, for when
his master died he made him his heir, and so Francis became a trader
on his own account. For a few years he was just a peaceful shipmaster,
making an honest and hard-won living; but all this time events were
arranging themselves in more and more martial array, and the bursting
of the storm was not very far off.
The actual fighting did not begin in the guise of recognised warfare
for a very considerable time. Spain and England were at peace, each
trying to humbug the other, but between Protestant and Catholic it
was otherwise. Armed cruisers manned by angry Protestants made their
appearance in the Narrow Seas, and whenever they got a chance fell upon
Catholic ships and avenged the sufferings of their fellow-heretics in a
fashion at once prompt and pitiless, and this at length so exasperated
Philip that he closed his ports to English trade, and Drake’s
occupation was gone. Better, in truth, had it been for Philip if he had
left him undisturbed in his business!
He sold his little vessel, went to Plymouth, and entered the service
of two kinsmen of his, one of whom was soon to prove somewhat of an
empire-maker in his own line and whose name, with certain others
soon to be mentioned, was destined to go down to everlasting fame
indissolubly linked with that of Francis Drake. This was Captain John
Hawkins, and when the young trader reached Plymouth he had just come
back with a shipload of gold and other precious things from his first
venture in slave-trading, and now at least Drake, who was still a lad
in his teens, must have heard something of the wonders of El Dorado.
Yet, curiously enough, when Captain Hawkins went back he did not go
with him. He sailed instead, as a sort of supercargo, in another of
Hawkins’ ships to Biscay, and there a momentous revelation awaited him,
as though to guide him on the path of his destiny.
At San Sebastian about a score of English sailors, once strong and
stalwart men of Devon, crept out of the dungeons of the Inquisition and
took passage with him home. King Philip had taken off his embargo now,
and these men were the remnant of the crew of a Plymouth ship which he
had seized in port when the embargo was laid on. The others had rotted
to death during the six months that he had bestowed his hospitality
upon them. We can imagine what talks they had on the way home, and no
doubt El Draque bore the stories of these forlorn mariners well in mind
on that most memorable day when he “singed the King of Spain’s beard”
at Cadiz.
John Hawkins came back from his second voyage richer than ever, and
now all the mariners of the South Coast were beginning to dream golden
dreams which were soon to become yet more golden deeds, and King
Philip, to whom all such ventures were the flattest piracy, began to
fear for his monopoly and instructed his ambassador in London to drop
the hint that foreign trade with the Indies was forbidden, upon which,
foolishly enough, or perhaps not knowing their own true strength, Queen
Bess’s councillors backed down and forbade John Hawkins to start again.
He, obediently enough, stayed at home, but a certain George Lovell got
together an expedition and slipped out to sea, westward bound. With him
went Francis Drake, at length to see for the first time the blue waters
and green shores of El Dorado. This time, however, it proved anything
but golden for him or his companions, for they came back with shattered
ships and still worse broken fortunes. They had drawn a blank in the
great lottery which half Europe was wanting to gamble in.
Nothing daunted, he shipped again, this time with George Fenner, bound
for Guiana. Again, financially speaking, the voyage ended in disaster,
but there was one incident in it destined to bear good fruit. A big
Portuguese galleasse, backed up by six gunboats, tried to enforce the
prohibition against foreign trade. Fenner had one ship and a pinnace,
and with these he fought the “Portugals” and thoroughly convinced them
by the logic of shot and steel that he was not the sort of man to be
prohibited from doing anything he wanted to do.
This forgotten action is really one of great importance. It was
Francis Drake’s first taste of fighting, which in itself means a good
deal, but it was also the beginning of that lordly and magnificent
contempt which the English mariners of that day were soon to feel for
all enemies, no matter how strong they might seem. It was this spirit
which a few years later was to take Sir Richard Grenville
“With his hundred men on deck and his ninety sick below,”
into the midst of the fifty-three Spanish ships which he fought for an
afternoon and a night before he surrendered so sorely against his will
and fell dead of his wounds on the deck of the Spanish flagship. It was
this, too, which, when that long seven days’ fight against the Armada
was raging and roaring up the Channel, brought the flag of the Spanish
Rear-Admiral down with a run just because the Little Pirate stamped his
foot on the deck of that same _Revenge_ and said that he was Francis
Drake and had no time to parley.
Meanwhile the rumblings of the war-storm in Europe had been growing
louder. The Netherlanders were at last turning on their torturers,
Darnley had been murdered and Mary Queen of Scots put in prison, so
Gloriana, feeling herself somewhat at leisure, took a hand in the
next buccaneering expedition. It may be noted here, by the way, that
there was no more ardent buccaneer and slave-trader in her dominions
than Good Queen Bess herself. She lent ships though she withheld her
commission, and her pirates did the rest. If disaster overtook them
or if the Spanish Minister raged against their doings she promptly
disowned them and felt sorry for her ships. But if they came back
happily filled to the hatches with plundered treasure, she took her
dividends and lent more ships.
It was thus with the expedition which sailed out of Plymouth on October
2, 1567, under the command of Admiral John Hawkins, whose second
officer was Francis Drake. The diplomacy of the times called it the
trading venture of Sir William Garrard and Co., but for all that there
were two ships of the Royal Navy in it, the _Jesus_ and the _Minion_,
and the merchandise it carried consisted mainly of cannon and small
arms, powder and shot, and cold steel.
The voyage began with a slave-raiding expedition down the Portuguese
coast of Africa, whence with five hundred slaves they crossed to the
Spanish Main. Here, after varying fortunes, they filled their ships
with treasure, and Hawkins turned his prows northward for home. But
while crossing the mouth of the Gulf of Mexico a furious hurricane
burst upon them and drove his gold-and-pearl-laden vessels so far into
it, that he came to the bold decision to put into the Spanish port of
Vera Cruz to refit.
In the harbour he found twelve great galleons loaded with gold and
silver, waiting for the convoy to escort them to Spain. They were
utterly at the mercy of the English ships, but John Hawkins, pirate
and slave-dealer, was still an English gentleman, so he made a solemn
convention to leave the treasure-ships alone on condition of being
allowed to refit in the harbour. Hawkins was already known in Spain
as the “Enemy of God,” and Don Martin Enriquez, the new Governor of
Mexico, had come out with special orders to abolish him by any means
that might be found the readiest.
Don Martin seems to have thought that in this case treachery would
suit best, so he signed the convention and gave his word of honour as
a gentleman of Spain that the English ships should be allowed to come
and go unmolested. So for three days the work of dismantling went on
in peace, and on the fourth, half-disabled as they were, they were
attacked. It was a fierce and bloody fight, and it ended in the sinking
of four galleons, the wrecking of the Spanish flag-ship, and the
killing of five or six hundred Spaniards.
But on the English side only the _Jesus_, the _Minion_, and the
_Judith_ got away and, shot-shattered and half-provisioned, began to
stagger homeward across the wide Atlantic. On the way the _Judith_ was
lost, and took to the bottom with her all the proceeds of many months
of trading and fighting and privation.
So the expedition came back poorer than it went, and Spain laughed
aloud, but, as will be seen, somewhat too soon. Drake got home first,
and no sooner did he land at Plymouth than he took horse for London.
It so happened that a little while before Spanish ships carrying a
huge amount of money to pay Alva’s army in the Netherlands, had been
driven into the Thames by the Protestant rovers lately mentioned, and
Gloriana, who never liked to let a good thing go, had held on to it on
one pretext or another until Drake came hot-footed and angry-hearted to
tell of the treachery of Vera Cruz.
Gloriana wanted nothing better. Her buccaneering venture had been a
failure and here was a way of paying herself for the two ships she
had risked, so she turned upon the Spanish Ambassador and told him
point blank that until the injury done to her “honest merchants” was
redressed she would hold the treasure in pledge. Naturally after that
not a groat of it ever got to Alva or his soldiers.
That year, which was 1569, Drake went to Rochelle with Sir Thomas
Wynter. The next summer he married Mary Newman, and a month or two
later he was again steering to the westward in two little vessels, the
_Dragon_ and the _Swan_. The next year he went again, with the _Swan_
alone, and this time he came back with a certain idea in his head which
was magnificent to the point of absurdity. The adventures of the last
two or three years had deepened his contempt for Spanish prowess, and
now he laughingly proposed to go back, not to kill the goose that laid
the King of Spain’s golden eggs, but to rifle the nest in which they
were deposited. This was Nombre de Dios, the strongest city in the New
World, and the richest to boot.
The means employed were, as was usual in this age of wonders,
ridiculously inadequate to the end to which they were devoted. Of late
years certain bold mariners have sought to win an ephemeral notoriety
by crossing the Atlantic in open boats. Francis Drake set out on a
serious and momentous expedition to the Spanish Main in the _Pasha_ of
70 tons followed by the _Swan_ of 25--that is to say in a couple of
fishing-boats. These two cockle-shells were manned by seventy-three men
all told, only one of whom had reached the age of thirty. It must have
looked more like a parcel of lads going afloat on a holiday spree than
an expedition with which all the world was soon to ring.
There is no space here to tell of all that befel these absurd
adventurers on their devious and tedious way to Nombre de Dios, though
no romancer ever imagined such a story as their adventures make. So it
must suffice to say that on July 29th he started out across the Isthmus
of Darien at the head of seventy-three men to attack a strong city as
big as Plymouth, and with these he actually fought his way into the
town, established himself in the centre of it and held it for some
hours.
[Illustration: THEY CARRIED HIM DOWN TO THE BOATS.]
If his men had been the seasoned buccaneers of his later raids he
would probably have taken it altogether, but they unhappily found in
the Governor’s house a stack of silver bars twelve feet high, ten feet
broad, and seventy feet long. This was a little too much for the nerves
of the Devon boys, but Drake would not let them touch it, since the
town was not yet theirs. Then a fearful rain-storm came on just about
dawn and put out their matches and ruined their bow-strings, and then
a terrible misfortune happened. Drake had been severely wounded in the
leg, but he had concealed his hurt until the supreme moment came, and
then, as he was leading his handful of heroes to the last attack, he
went down with his boot full of blood. Something very like a panic now
took his men, not for their own sakes but for his. In vain he stormed
at them, and cried angrily:
“I have brought you to the door of the Treasure-house of the World!
Will ye be fools enough to go away empty?”
“Your life is more precious to us and England than all the gold of the
Indies!” they replied, and so by kindly force they carried him down to
the boats and rowed away, having accomplished perhaps the most splendid
failure in history.
The fame of this exploit instantly echoed through the whole Spanish
Main and thence across the Atlantic to Europe. A few days later he
avenged his failure at Nombre de Dios by cutting a big ship out from
under the guns of Cartagena. Then he vanished, leaving no other trace
behind him than the poor little abandoned _Swan_. For the next few
months nothing was seen of him, though his hand was felt far and wide
along the coast. Spanish store-ships disappeared, dispatch boats were
intercepted, and coast-towns were raided with bewildering rapidity and
effectiveness.
But all this time the deadly tropical fever was playing havoc with his
little handful of men. His brother John died of it, and man after man
was struck down till at last, out of the seventy-three who had sailed
with him from Plymouth, he could only muster eighteen fighting men when
he at length started to plunder the mule-train from Panama.
On the fourth day of the journey a very memorable thing happened, for
that noon he reached the top of the dividing ridge of the Isthmus, and
lo! there before him, only a few miles away, lay the smooth, shining
expanse of the Pacific Ocean, that long-hidden, jealously-guarded sea
on which his were the first English eyes that had ever gazed. He did
just what such a man would have done in such circumstances. He fell on
his knees and, raising his hands to heaven, cried aloud:
“Almighty God, of Thy goodness, give me life and leave once to sail an
English ship on yonder sea!”
Years afterwards the prayer was granted, and not only did he sail on
the Golden Sea, but crossed it while he was making the first voyage
that an Englishman ever made round the world.
Were I writing a book instead of an essay I could tell of the
plundering of the mule-trains, of the taking of Vera Cruz--where, to
the astonishment of the Spaniards, he would not allow a single woman or
an unarmed man to be hurt--and Nombre de Dios, which did not resist him
so well the second time. It must, however, be enough to say that this
time everything ended happily for the remnant that survived, and that
on Sunday morning, August 9, 1573, while the good folks of Plymouth
were in church, they heard a roar of artillery from the batteries
followed by an answering salute from the sea and, straightway quitting
their devotions, they ran out to learn the good news that Gloriana’s
Little Pirate had come back safe at last and well loaded up with
plunder.
His next venture was nothing less than that famous voyage of his round
the world, with the fairy-story of which we have here nothing to do
save to say that the fame of it, no less than the enormous treasure,
the plunder of a hundred ships and a score of towns, with which the
poor sea-worn, worm-eaten, wind-weary _Golden Hind_, staggered one
Michaelmas morning into Plymouth Sound, at last convinced Queen Bess
that in her dear Little Pirate--whom, by the way, she had never yet
openly recognised--she had a champion who was worth a good many
thousands of King Philip’s soldiers and sailors.